Doomstalker (2 page)

“Yes, Dam.” Marika slipped through heavy hangings that kept the cold from roaring in when the doorway was open. She stood for a moment with paw upon the latch before pushing into the cold. Zertan. Maybe they ought to rid themselves of crazy old females instead of pups, she thought. Kublin was far more useful than was Granddam. Granddam no longer contributed anything but complaint.

She drew a last deep, smoky breath, then stepped into the gale. Her eyes watered instantly. Head down, she trudged across the central square. If she hurried she could make it before she started shivering.

The Degnan loghouses stood in two ranks of three, one north, one south, with fifty feet of open space between ranks. Skiljan’s loghouse was the middle one in the northern rank, flanked by those of Dorlaque and Logusz. Gerrien’s was the end loghouse on Marika’s left as she faced south. Meth named Foehse and Kuzmic ruled the center and right loghouses, respectively. Seldom did any but Gerrien have much impact on Marika’s life. Gerrien and Skiljan had been both friends and competitors since they were pups.

The packstead stockade, and the lean-tos clutching its skirts, clung close to the outer loghouses and spiraled around the packstead twice. Any raider would have to come in through a yard-wide channel, all the way around, to reach her goal. Unlike some neighboring packs, the Degnan made no effort to enclose their gardens and fields. Threats came during winter anyway. Decision had been made in the days-of-building to trade the risk of siege in growing time for the advantage of having to defend a shorter palisade.

The square between loghouse ranks seemed so barren, so naked this time of year. In summer it was always loosely controlled chaos, with game being salted, hides being tanned, pups running wild.

Six loghouses. The Degnan packstead was the biggest in this part of the upper Ponath, and the richest. Their neighbors envied them. But Marika, whose head was filled with dreams, did not feel wealthy. She was miserable most of the time, feeling deprived by birth.

In the south there were places called cities, tradermales said. Places where they made the precious iron tools the Wise accepted in exchange for otec furs. Places where many packs lived together in houses built not of logs but of stone. Places where winter’s breath was ever so much lighter, and the stone houses turned the cold with ease. Places that, just by being elsewhere, by definition would be better than here.

Many an hour had she and Kublin passed dreaming aloud of what it would be like to live there.

Tradermales also told of a stone place called a packfast, which stood just three days down the nearby river, where that joined another to become the Hainlin, a river celebrated in the Chronicle as the guide which the Degnan had followed into the upper Ponath in ancient times. Tradermales said a real road started below the packfast, and wound through mountains and plains southward to great cities whose names Marika could never recall.

Marika’s dam had been to that stone packfast several times. Each year the great ones who dwelt there summoned the leading females of the upper Ponath. Skiljan would be gone for ten days. It was said there were ceremonies and payments of tribute, but about none of that would Skiljan speak, except to mutter under her breath, “Silth bitches,” and say, “In time, Marika. In due time. It is not a thing to be rushed.” Skiljan was not one to frighten, yet she seemed afraid to have her pups visit.

Other pups, younger than Marika, had gone last summer, returning with tales of wonder, thrilled to have something about which to brag. But Skiljan would not yield. Already she and Marika had clashed about the summer to come.

Marika realized she had stopped moving, was standing in the wind and shivering. Dreamer, the huntresses and Wise called her mockingly — and sometimes, when they thought she was not attentive, with little side glances larded with uncertainty or fright — and they were right. It was a good thing pups were not permitted into the forest now. Her dreaming had become uncontrolled. She would find some early frostflower or pretty creekside pebble and the grauken would get her while she contemplated its beauty.

She entered Gerrien’s loghouse. Its interior was very like Skiljan’s. The odors were a touch different. Gerrien housed more males, and the wintertime crafts of her loghouse all involved woodworking. Logusz’s loghouse always smelled worst. Her meth were mainly tanners and leather workers.

Marika stood before the windskins, waiting to be recognized. It was but a moment before Gerrien sent a pup to investigate. This was a loghouse more relaxed than that ruled by Skiljan. There was more merriment here, always, and more happiness. Gerriaen was not intimidated by the hard life of the upper Ponath. She took what came and refused to battle the future before it arrived. Marika sometimes wished she had been whelped by cheerful Gerrien instead of brooding Skiljan.

“What?” demanded Solfrank, a male two years her elder, almost ready for the rites of adulthood, which would compel him to depart the packstead and wander the upper Ponath in search of a pack that would take him in. His chances were excellent. Degnan males took with them envied education and skills.

Marika did not like Solfrank. The dislike was mutual. It extended back years, to a time when the male had thought his age advantage more than overbalanced his sexual handicap. He had bullied; Marika had refused to yield; young teeth had been bared; the older pup had been forced to submit. Solfrank never would forgive her the humiliation. The grudge was well-known. It was a stain he would bear with him in his search for a new pack.

“Dam sends me with two score and ten arrowheads ready for the shaft.” Marika bared teeth slightly. A hint of mockery, a hint of I-dare-you. “Granddam wants the needles Borget promised.”

Marika reflected that Kublin liked Solfrank. When he was not tagging after her, he trotted around after Gerrien’s whelp — and brought back all the corrupt ideas Solfrank whispered in his ear. At least Zamberlin knew him for what he was and viewed him with due contempt.

Solfrank bared his teeth, pleasured by further evidence that those who dwelt in Skiljan’s loghouse were mad. “I’ll tell Dam.”

In minutes Marika clutched a bundle of ready arrows. Gerrien herself brought a small piece of fine skin in which she had wrapped several bone needles. “These were Borget’s. Tell Skiljan we will want them back.”

Not the iron needles. The iron were too precious. But... Marika did not understand till she was outside again.

Gerrien did not expect Zertan to live much longer. These few needles, which had belonged to her sometime friend — and as often in council, enemy — might pleasure her in her failing days. Though she did not like her granddam, a tear formed in the corner of Marika’s eye. It froze quickly and stung, and she brushed at it irritably with a heavily gloved paw.

She was just three steps from home when she heard the cry on the wind, faint and far and almost indiscernible. She had not heard such a cry before, but she knew it instantly. That was the cry of a meth in sudden pain.

Degnan huntresses were out, as they were every day when time were hard. Males were out seeking deadwood. There might be trouble. She hurried inside and did not wait to be recognized before she started babbling. “It came from the direction of Machen Cave,” she concluded, shuddering. She was afraid of Machen Cave.

Skiljan exchanged looks with her lieutenants. “Up the ladder now, pup,” she said. “Up the ladder.”

“But Dam...” Marika wilted before a fierce look. She scurried up the ladder. The other pups greeted her with questions. She ignored them, huddled with Kublin. “It came from the direction of Machen Cave.”

“That’s miles away,” Kublin reminded.

“I know.” Maybe she had imagined the cry. Dreamed it. “But it came from that direction. That’s all I said. I didn’t claim it came from the cave.”

Kublin shivered. He said nothing more. Neither did Marika.

They were very afraid of Machen Cave, those pups. They believed they had been given reason.

III

It had been high summer, a time when danger was all of one’s own making. Pups were allowed free run of forest and hill, that they might come to know their pack’s territory. Their work and play were all shaped to teach skills adults would need to survive to raise their own pups.

Marika almost always ran with her littermates, especially Kublin. Zamberlin seldom did anything not required of him.

Kublin, though, hadn’t Marika’s stamina, strength, or nerve. She sometimes became impatient with him. In her crueler moments she would hide and force him to find his own way. He did so whining, complaining, sullenly, and slow, but he always managed. He was capable enough at his own pace.

North and east of the packstead stood Stapen Rock, a bizarre basalt upthrust the early Wise designated as spiritually and ritually significant. At Stapen Rock the Wise communed with the spirits of the forest and made offerings meant to assure good hunting, rich mast crops, fat and juicy berries, and a plentitude of chote. Chote being a knee-high plant edible in leaf, fruit, and fat, sweet, tuberous root. The root would store indefinitely in a dark, cool, dry place.

Stapen Rock was the chief of five such natural shrines recalling old Degnan animistic traditions. Others were dedicated to the spirits of air and water, fire and the underworld. The All itself, supercessor of the old way, was sanctified within the loghouses themselves.

Machen Cave, gateway to the world below, centered the shadowed side of life. Pohsit, sagan in Skiljan’s loghouse, and her like visited Machen Cave regularly, propitiating shadows and the dead, refreshing spells which bound the gateway against those.

The Degnan were not superstitious by the standards of the Ponath, but in the case of shadows no offering was spared to avert baleful influences. The spells sealing the cave were always numerous and fresh.

Marika played a game with herself and Kublin, one that stretched their courage. It required them to approach the fane nearer than fear would permit. Timid, Kublin remained ever close to her when they ran the woods. If, perforce, he went with her.

Marika had been playing that game for three summers. In the summer before the great winter, though, it ceased being pup play.

As always, Kublin was reluctant. At a respectful distance he began, “Marika, I’m tired. Can we go home now?”

“It’s just the middle of the afternoon, Kublin. Are you an infant that needs a nap?” Then distraction. “Oh. Look.”

She had spotted a patch of chote, thick among old leaves on a ravine bank facing northward. Chote grew best where it received little direct sunlight. It was an ephemeral plant, springing up, flowering, fruiting, and wilting all within thirty days. A patch this lush could not have gone unnoticed. In fact, it would have been there for years. But she would report it. Pups were expected to report discoveries. If nothing else, such reports revealed how well they knew their territory.

She forgot the cave. She searched for those plants with two double-paw-sized leaves instead of one. The female chote fruited on a short stem growing from the crotch where the leaf stems joined. “Here’s one. Not ripe. This one’s not ripe either.”

Kublin found the first ripe fruit, a one-by-one-and-a-half-inch ovoid a pale greenish yellow beginning to show spots of brown. “Here.” He held it up.

Marika found another a moment later. She bit a hole, sucked tangy, acid juice, then split the shell of the fruit. She removed the seeds, which she buried immediately. There was little meat to chote fruit, and that with an unpalatable bitterness near the skin. She scraped the better part carefully with a small stone knife. The long meth jaw and carnivore teeth made getting the meat with the mouth impossible.

Kublin seemed determined to devour every fruit in the patch. Marika concluded he was stalling. “Come on.”

She wished Zamberlin had come. Kublin was less balky then. But Zamberlin was running with friends this year, and those friends had no use for Kublin, who could not maintain their pace.

They were growing apart. Marika did not like that, though she knew there was no avoiding it. In a few years they would assume adult roles. Then Zambi and Kub would be gone entirely...

Poor Kublin. And a mind was of no value in a male.

Across a trickle of a creek, up a slope, across a small meadow, down the wooded slope bordering a larger creek, and downstream a third of a mile. There the creek skirted the hip of a substantial hill, the first of those that rose to become the Zhotak. Marika settled on her haunches a hundred feet from the stream and thirty above its level. She stared at the shadow among brush and rocks opposite that marked the mouth of the cave. Kublin settled beside her, breathing rapidly though she had not set a hard pace.

There were times when even she was impatient with his lack of stamina.

Sunlight slanted down through the leaves, illuminating blossoms of white, yellow, and pale red. Winged things flitted from branch to branch through the dapple of sunlight and shadow, seeming to flicker in and out of existence. Some light fell near the cave mouth, but did nothing to illuminate its interior.

Marika never had approached closer than the near bank of the creek. From there, or where she squatted now, she could discern nothing but the glob of darkness. Even the propitiary altar was invisible.

It was said that meth of the south mocked their more primitive cousins for appeasing spirits that would ignore them in any case. Even among the Degnan there were those who took only the All seriously. But even they attended ceremonies. Just in case. Ponath meth seldom took chances.

Marika had heard that the nomad packs of the Zhotak practiced animistic rites which postulated dark and light spirits, gods and devils, in everything. Even rocks.

Kublin had his breath. Marika rose. Sliding, she descended to the creek. Kublin followed tautly. He was frightened, but he did not protest, not even when she leapt the stream. He followed. For once he seemed determined to outgut her.

Something stirred within Marika as she stared upslope. From where she stood the sole evidence of the cave’s presence was a trickle of mossy water on slick stone, coming from above. In some seasons a stream poured out of the cave.