Hiero Desteen (Omnibus) (12 page)

Led by what? The priest continued to brood as he saddled Klootz and swung up into the saddle for the night's ride. And as he rode along under the serene light of the moon and countless stars, he continued to dwell on the problem. The hunting pack of giant water-ferrets had simply followed the trail by means of their keen noses. Or had they? Had they, and perhaps the flier too, some better guide, some aid which allowed them, if not to pinpoint the exact location of the three, at least to know the general position where they might be found? "Damn it, how!" Hiero muttered aloud in vexation. "It's as if they had a string on me somehow, something on me they could follow, like a bad smell that never grows any fainter."

His thoughts shifted to the Unclean as he spoke, and suddenly he grunted at his own stupidity. Quickly he ordered a halt. They were crossing a hard-packed sandbar at the time, and the instant Klootz and the bear stopped, Hiero was down on the ground, tearing open one of the saddlebags. His hand seized what he wanted, and he pulled it out into the moonlight.

It was a moment of irritation, bitter and intense, when he held the betrayer in his hand. He smiled grimly at the realization of how the possessions of the dead adept, S'nerg, had led his foul avengers upon the tracks of his killers. The tiny bead of light in the thing like a compass glowed steadily as it rocked back and forth on its circular track. The priest needed no more proof; he
knew.

Whatever else the curious instrument was, and it probably had several uses, it was also a "homer" of some kind, a fix which told the position of its owner to his friends so that he would never be totally out of touch. Enraged at his own folly, Hiero crushed the instrument under his heel. He had no fear of the rod and the knife, since he knew the former's powers, and the knife was simply and only that, a knife. Once more he remounted and, with a lighter heart, signaled his companions to lead off south.

Far away, in a place buried deep beyond the reach of the last, dimmest ray of the sun, a hooded figure turned from a great board of many-colored lights, and pointing to one darkened bulb which was set in a vast wire frame, showed by a shrug that it had now gone out.

Luchare

By the time the next dawn that they made camp, well before the rising of the. sun, Hiero and the two animals could see that the great marsh was at last coming to an end. All night the hard sandbars had grown more and more frequent, steadily replacing the mud and soft muck of the swamp. Huge logs, some still bearing leaves, showed that seasonal flooding or storm-driven waters came into this area at frequent intervals. Patches of higher, firmer ground now supported stunted trees instead of the great reeds, and occasional spines of rock protruded from the ponds and channels, forming craggy islets in the wider and more open stretches. Halting on top of one of these, whose ramplike slope had tempted him to gain a better look about, the man glimpsed a number of great, domed shapes, black against the moonlit sand, moving on a beach below him. Their furious activity puzzled him until he realized that he had caught a group of snappers laying their leathery eggs in the churned-up sand. He dismounted and waited patiently, signaling the bear to do the same. After the moon reached zenith, the last of the monster turtles waddled back into the water and disappeared, their task of reproduction over for another season.

Keeping a sharp eye out for any stragglers, Hiero and the bear went down and dug up a nest they had previously marked in the moonlight as being in a shallow hole. Gorm gulped down three of the great, golden-yolked things, each an easy hand length in diameter, while Hiero spooned up one himself. But he packed the morse's saddlebags with eight more, all he could get in and then the group set off again, the bear moving rather more slowly because of his gorged stomach.

As they topped a small rise in the land, Hiero reined up. Ahead of them reared a row of dark hills which shut off the view of the country beyond. Where these mysterious mountains had come from was a puzzle to him, since they ought to have been visible a long way off and yet had not been. He decided to camp on the spot, selecting a handy cleft in a large rock which was partly overhung by vines and bushes. The puzzle of the suddenly appearing hills could wait for dawn, and that was not far away.

As the sun slowly rose, Hiero peered out and started to laugh, in both joy and relief, making the bear look curiously at him. The "mountains" he had seen a few hours before were nothing but a crest of tall sand dunes, and they were no more than a mile away, across a belt of scrub with a few streams trickling through them. He, or they, rather, had conquered the great marsh!

For a long time he lay, the morning sun warm on his tanned brow, and watched the dunes. A short distance beyond them could only lie the Inland Sea. A road led to the extreme western edge of this great body of fresh water, that is, a road from the Metz Republic, far to the northwest. But Hiero knew that he was nowhere near the place where that road reached the brawling port town of Namcush. He must be hundreds of miles further to the east, and what towns if any lay in this part of the sea or on its shores, no one really knew, beyond perhaps some few close-mouthed and suspicious merchants. The men of the merchant guilds sometimes voyaged for thousands of miles, but many of them were pagans with no love for the Abbeys, or the Republic either, or indeed any governing body, save their own loose, mercantile federation. They were not men who gave up information easily, and more than one of them was certain to be allied with, if not an actual servant of, the Unclean. Yet it was necessary to deal with the merchants, and some of them were good men who served as spies and secret messengers for the Abbeys, often earning themselves a horrible death.

It was mostly information given by trading merchants, sometimes filtered through thousands of miles of rumor, which Hiero had stored in his brain, ready for mnemonic recall whenever he needed it. But any information of the Inland Sea's eastern, central, or southern end was vague, out-of-date, and apt to be inaccurate.

A number of ships sailed the Inland Sea, some of them mere rowing barges but most with sails. Pirates manned some of them, and merchants and traders others. Sometimes it was hard to tell which was which, for, like the Vikings of remote legend, an honest merchant sometimes found a colleague in trouble too easy a bargain to resist.

Also in the deep waters and among the many islands skulked the Unclean, in strange, seldom-glimpsed craft. And there were great beasts too, lurking in the open deeps, some of which came into shallow water to seize their prey. Other vast, nameless monsters were said to be plant eaters, but were nonetheless bellicose and easily aroused to fury.

The worst of the so-called natural disasters and perils, though, were ancient, as old as the Inland Sea itself, which had once been five smaller seas, a thing the oldest of the Abbey's preserved maps clearly showed. These were the places of the cold Death, where the fires of the dreadful radiation of the last cataclysm still poisoned the air and water. Most of them had lost their once dreadful potency. Daring freebooters sometimes risked a horrible end to loot one of the Lost Cities which bordered the Inland Sea and had been designated over five thousand years gone as First Strike targets. Some of these dreaded places were plague centers too, so that a man ran the risk of dying hideously of radiation poisoning, or, if he missed that, of some fell sickness and of passing that on to his neighbors before he died himself.

As a result, those who went to the Lost Cities, even those places judged to be cleansed by time and the elements, were apt to do so secretly, lest their fellows (unless pirates themselves) be inclined to kill them out of hand for threatening them in turn with an unpleasant death by disease.

Around the shores of the Sea and on its surface, too, roamed various groups of human nomads, some living from the water directly, as fishermen, others gleaning the refuse of the shore or doing both and living in semi-permanent camps. By all accounts, the Inland Sea and its environs was a lively place, where a man could get himself killed in a different way for each of the twenty-four hours, seven days a week, with no fear of repetition.

All this ran through Hiero's mind as he stared at the dunes and imagined what might lie on their far side. And so dreaming, he fell asleep, the sun beating down on his bearded face, tangled black hair, now stiff with filth, and his mud-caked clothes, A piece of abandoned human refuse, he looked, as he lay under the hot sun, instead of a Per of the Church Universal and an Abbey scholar of good repute.

Anxious to push on, he allowed Klootz only a short time to browse that evening. The young bear had caught Hiero's excitement and was as eager to be off as he. As soon as they had gulped a meal of five-day-old grouse (now growing a shade high) and biscuits, they set off, all feeling a sense of release after the ordeal behind them.

The moonlit scrub area which lay between them and the tall dunes proved to be mostly berry bushes, intermingled with a few low cactuses of the pincushion variety. The ripe berries, a reddish brown, were tasted by the bear, who at once began to gulp pawfuls. The big morse wasted no time in reaching out and lipping in whole branches, and Hiero, after failing to identify the fruit, nevertheless ate a pound of the sweet things himself and felt the better for it. When all three could hold no more, they ambled on, feeling much too full to set a fast pace.

The white sand dunes, soon reached, proved to be only about a hundred feet high and filled with gullies and other easy methods of gaining the top. In no time, the travelers stood at the summit of one of them and gazed in delight at the sight which lay before them, spread out clear and distinct under the soft light of the three-quarter moon.

They were gazing down at a great bay of the Inland Sea. Directly before them, below and no more than a thousand paces away, was a long, white strand, blotched and partially covered with driftwood and flotsam. Straight out to the calm south, the water lay almost motionless until the gaze met the dark horizon of night. Faintly visible to both right and left, tall, black promontories guarded the mouth of the bay, which was perhaps five miles deep and twice that wide. No breeze but the faintest, stirred, hardly enough to ruffle the man's filthy locks. The water was as calm as a bath. The Inland Sea, whose savage storms were legendary, was in a moment of repose and slept, undisturbed by any wind or other atmospheric turbulence.

But all was not lifeless. From the shore below them, and out some few leagues into the bay, great leaves, round and many yards across, floated on the smooth mirror of the water. White flowers, blooms of some enormous lily, opened here and there, and the intoxicating perfume they gave off was so strong that Hiero could almost feel the fragrance as a material thing.

In the open water between the giant lily pads, great, dark bodies noisily churned the water into boils of foam and then vanished, only to reappear and shatter the calm surface somewhere else a hundred feet away. A herd of some enormous, feeding animals were disporting themselves, wallowing and splashing in the relative shallows near shore, and as they rose and sank, small waves rolled up the gentle beach and the huge round leaves of the lilies dipped and rocked on the water, set in uneasy motion.

Hiero sat down with a sigh to watch. His hopes of a clean bath in the sea were obviously doomed to postponement. Even allowing for the distortion of night, any one of those things down there would make four of Klootz, big as he was, Gorm and the morse sniffed the breeze in loud snorts, excited at the smells of the night and the noise of the sportive behemoths. Hiero bade them lie down and wait with him.

Presently one of the creatures emerged from the water and waddled out upon the sand directly below the watchers. It was huge, long, and low, balanced on four short, sturdy legs, each with three wide toes. There was a great, blunt head, shaped like a long-snouted keg. It yawned suddenly, displaying a pale gullet in the moonlight, which also glinted on huge tusks set at each corner of the gaping jaws. As the water ran off its great back in runnels, a short, plush coat of fur began to dry and give the animal a lighter shade of color. Something in looks like a cross between a pre-Death hog, a hippopotamus, and even a Brobdingnagian seal, what its ancestors had been was a mystery. It began to graze contentedly on some short-stemmed plants, and the contrast between its peaceable eating habits and otherwise horrendous demeanor made Hiero chuckle.

Faint as the sound was, the great beast heard it and its small ears flapped vigorously as it looked suspiciously about. Deciding the neighborhood was apparently dangerous, even though it could see nothing, it lumbered back into the water, twitching a tiny curled tail, and rejoined its fellows among the enormous lily pads.

Happening to glance beyond the herd and out to sea, the priest caught an even more wonderful sight, which left him dumb with amazement and awe.

From the quiet water out near the mouth of the bay, there soared into the moonlit night the black outline of a monster fish, long and slender with a sharp-pointed head, identical in appearance with the pike Hiero was used to hooking in every cool northern lake. For a fleeting instant he felt himself back in his piney wilderness looking at a leaping catch, not on the unknown shores of the warm sea of the South. Then, as he shook his head to clear his vision, the
scale
of what he was seeing came home to him.

"God in Heaven!" he murmured aloud. The titanic, falling shape hit the shining water with a crack which echoed like the noise of a colossal thrower shell, and the sound echoed back from the distant cliffs.
The fish he had just seen could have swallowed one of the ponderous water beasts below him in two bites!

He looked down in amazement. A few ripples stirred the giant leaves, and tiny wavelets lapped the shore, but otherwise nothing stirred. Only streaks of iridescent oil on the dark water told him that he had not been dreaming. The advent of the leviathan he had just seen had made the herd of great water hogs vanish as silently as if they had never been there at all.