Hiero Desteen (Omnibus) (67 page)

Grilparzer was made of sterner material. He was unhappy, but he felt he had a duty to this pleasant-spoken foreigner and he was going to do his best. He halted and put his hand on Hiero's chest, to make the Metz halt.

"When I was a little lad, other men came. Not like you, but they spoke the way you did at first. They wanted to trade things with us. For hides and fur, they had metal and cloth such as we almost never see. When we do, well, we get it the way we got theirs." He was obviously wrestling with a concept of utter horror to him, and again Hiero felt the sweat of mental fear. In fact, the man was sweating physically! But he persevered.

"We tried in every way we could to get them to leave. They were well armed and laughed at us. They camped by the gate and lighted many fires. They put out guards and we locked and barred the gate." He paused again. "In the morning they were gone. All of them, as we knew they would be. A great company, two tens of strong men and all their beasts of burden. Most of their gear was left. After a while, we went out and took it and covered the ashes of their burned-out fires." He tapped the bronze hilt of a dagger thrust into his belt. "I got this knife then when we shared their goods among us."

Hiero was silent as he thought. Whatever drove these people, there was no doubt of their sincerity. That could not be concealed. Ghosts! He still stood poised in thought, however. The ugly story he had heard must have had some basis in fact. Whatever had happened to the unfortunate traders of long ago, it appeared to have something besides irrational fright behind it.

"All right," he said at length. "I see that you fear the night and what may come in the dark hours." Some stray thought stirred in his subconscious and he added, not quite sure why, "I do not fear that which runs in the night."

The man who stood before him shrank back as if lashed over the face. Spinning on his heel, he ran for the village gate, bawling something as he went. An approaching youth hastily deposited some burden he carried on the earth and also turned and fled. All the other men were running full out, too, as if Hiero were some demon who would devour them on the instant.

The gate, which was only a few hundred yards away, began to close as the last of the running men passed through it. Hiero heard it thud heavily shut behind them. He walked slowly forward and stooped to examine the parcel that the youngster had dropped so quickly. As he had thought, it was two loaves of the promised bread, still hot from some crude oven and wrapped in a piece of hide.

He stood up and looked about him. The distant herdsmen also were gone, and so were their herds. The westering sun was now slanting down with the light of late afternoon. Hiero looked curiously at the palisade and the sharpened stakes of the village. Neither there nor on the platform in the great tree was any head visible. Some distant antelope raised a small cloud of dust far off in the path of the red sun. Aside from these, nothing moved, save for a few vultures, black dots in the high sky.

His mind went out and he sought to probe the village. All he could get was an amorphous mass of stark terror, even for him almost impossible to penetrate and pick out individual minds. The strength of the fear amazed him.
Why, it's as if it were ingrained, hereditary or something,
he thought.

Picking up the bundle of bread, he shouldered his spear and set off at a walk for the nearest trees, perhaps half a mile away.
Be damned if I'll run,
was his last thought.

Hunters and Their Prey

Hiero lay stretched along a great fork, far up on the outer limb of the tree. In the distance, the roar of the saberfang rumbled, to be followed by silence. It was a cloudy night, and the moon came and went fitfully from gaps in the racing clouds. He was staring in the direction of the distant village, but he could see only its outline, a black and lightless mound in the intermittent moon gleams. No sound had come from it since he had found his present perch, save for the occasional restless mooing of a kaw somewhere in a pen.

He lay at seeming ease, but his spear was firmly held in his right fist, and his shield was strapped on the other arm. In need, he could drop the haft of the spear and draw the ancient short sword from over his shoulder in a second. There was no way he could get into a better position for defense. Now he could only wait and see what the night brought.

The tree had been reached and his site selected well before the last light faded in the west. He had eaten, and the coarse bread tasted fine, after many weeks deprived of grain. With the coming of dark, he had cautiously begun to probe with his mind, sending out his thoughts on an ever-widening sweep. And it was then that the surprises had commenced. Almost instantly he had touch with another mind!

As soon as his own feather caress struck it, the strange mind withdrew, flinching away and out of reach like a snake whipping back into a coil. There was no communication, only the instant retreat. He felt that it had neither known what had touched it nor sought to know. It had simply used a trigger reflex, one as good as his own, an automatic cutoff, so to speak. Whatever the mind was, it had a built-in safety factor, which snapped it out of any contact almost before the contact had been established. This gave one to think. His own abilities along those lines had been patiently learned under pressure, the pressure of the Unclean. But he had a feeling that this mind needed no such training, but was born the way it was.

In the coolness of the night, with a fine, fresh breeze rustling the leaves all about him, he set about trying to find the mind again. And this time he received a fresh surprise. His muscles tensed in reaction as he felt the new contacts. There was a whole group of similar minds, perhaps as many as a dozen!

Again came the trigger reaction as they evaded him, hiding behind mental shields so tight he could gain no opening. This time, though, he felt that at least one of the strangers had sensed him, but only fleetingly. He caught the shadow of awareness as it vanished. It might not know what had touched it, but it knew something had done so. He decided to lie quiet for a bit and try nothing further. Perhaps he could learn something by different methods. His mind stayed open, receptive to any outside thoughts at all. If he waited thus, the elusive creatures he had detected might come to him, hunting for contacts in their own way.

For a long time thereafter, nothing happened. When something finally did, it seemed to have nothing" to do with him. His first notice of it was a physical one. Far out on the savanna, to the northeast of both the Metz and the silent walls of the village, he heard the squeal of a frightened animal. Hiero had idly wondered earlier at the absence of the larger animals from the vicinity of the village. Earlier, there had been plenty of them about, but only in the middle distance. Now in the dark hours, there seemed to be none at all of either predators or those they hunted. All the life about him was small in size. There were snakes and lizards, rodents and weasels, plus a few foxlike beasts. The cry from far out in the dark was that of something large, something hunted and terrified. He felt for it with his mind and also listened with his ears. Presently, he detected it with both. He could hear, though only faintly, the drum of racing hoofbeats, and in his brain came the panic of a big herbivore of some kind, running at its hardest, running until its heart was bursting. He could feel the direction and knew the animal was coming closer rapidly.

The moon broke through the flying clouds and he now actually saw the chase, etched in black and grays. The figure of a big buck with tall lyrate horns was galloping for its life. Behind it, the hunters came—and they were an amazing sight.

They were bipedal and they were running at a speed the man would not have believed possible. The fastest Mu'aman racer of Luchare's kingdom would have been left far behind such runners. Hiero knew well what a pace one of the big antelopes could set, and these things were hauling it down!

Straining his eyes, he could see that there were perhaps a half dozen of the pursuers and that they were very thin and tall. Whatever they were, he decided not to try to probe their minds at this time. The hunt was rapidly drawing close to his clump of trees. If they were the elusive minds he had tried to track earlier, and he was quite certain that they were, this did not seem the time to call their attention to him. Then he realized that he was to have little choice in the matter. He saw suddenly that the hunted beast was not trying to reach his area at all! Being a creature of the open, it was attempting to flee to the outer savannas. It was coming toward his trees because it had no choice. The incredible runners were driving it there.

As he watched, Hiero saw the big antelope try repeatedly to check and break away. Each time, one of the tall bipeds increased its own already fantastic speed and closed the gap, forcing the prey back on the track they had chosen for it. Moreover, it was not being herded to the clump of trees, the Metz realized in a hurry. It was being chased specifically to
his
tree!

Still as a stone, he watched the end. The buck turned at bay, its back to the trunk of his own refuge. He could have dropped a stick on the heaving sides or the lowered horns.

The end came very quickly. One of the shadowy hunters charged straight at the horns and then, with a movement so rapid that the man could hardly follow it, darted away at right angles, no more than the thickness of a knife blade from being impaled on the points. This was all the opportunity needed by the others. At the same incredible pace, another one darted in from the side and merged with the neck of the buck. There was a flash of light, glittering under the moon, and the second killer sped on, hardly seeming to pause.

The antelope shook its head and tried to brace its forelegs. A dark stream was pouring from its throat. With one final shudder, it collapsed, kicked once or twice, and then was still. Hiero thought he had never seen a neater, quicker kill. He looked quickly away from the body to see what the alien bipeds would do next and got another surprise. They had vanished.

One moment there were six tall, lean shapes in a semicircle around his tree; the next, the night was empty. It was as if they had never been. Were it not for the corpse of the antelope, Hiero might have thought he was dreaming.

He waited warily. It hardly seemed likely that a mere accident had caused the strange chase to be led so unerringly to his hiding place. No, something else was coming, and he had better be ready for it.

What came was nothing physical. He simply began to feel a sensation of fear growing in his mind. It was not a thought of any kind, nothing so clear and identifiable. Rather, it was more like a feeling of oppression, a sensation produced when the barometer was dropping and the air was hushed and heavy with the presence of an oncoming storm. Only in this case, he felt afraid!

Something was coming, something was stalking him, and he was helpless to defend himself. The shadows were full of yellow or orange eyes, all piercing the dark and all concentrated on him alone. A whiff of a curious odor came to him on the night wind, musky, fetid, and also vaguely familiar. The scent seemed to heighten the fear, and his hand even loosened the grip on his spear for an instant.

The movement of his hand served as a bracer. His brain cleared, and he realized that he was falling under a spell of a kind he had never before encountered. He, who had hunted all his life, was now being hunted. Worse, he was being treated as if he were already a helpless victim! He rallied himself and began to trace the strange glamour which was falling over him.

It was not his mind that was under attack. That type of assault he could easily guard against, and no warnings of such a thing had occurred. What, then? His body? Save for the acrid and feral odor, he had detected nothing physical at all. Yet he knew beyond the shadow of any doubt that he was the focusing point of a planned attack. The sensation of great fear was still there, but now he had mastered it, and it no longer had the power to make him do anything he did not choose.

The eyes were an illusion, created by fear. He could not actually see them. The bile rising in his mouth and the sweat starting on his skin were also products of fear, the irrational fear which his brain could control, but which seemed to have nothing to do with any ratiocination. Incredible as it appeared, he was under attack on his will by
chemical
methods aided by a mental assault on his emotions. His eyes narrowed in thought as he began to break down the course of this biological onslaught. At the same time, he mentally apologized to the villagers whom he had thought so stupid. If this was a sample of what they had to live with, he had much maligned them in his previous views on the subject!

Somehow, these runners in the night could take aim at: the deep animal levels of the psyche. The scent, probably a natural weapon, was the second weapon, used to enhance the fear started by concentrated will Intellectual ability was no defense at ail against such an animal barrage. It totally bypassed the brain and struck at the root of feelings, the same basic emotions that made a child cry or a dog salivate. By the time these creatures had got a good hold on the emotional centers of their prey's inner self, he was doomed. He was literally frightened to death, long before the actual kill took place. The dead buck could probably have been reduced to utter helplessness, had the hunters chosen, so that it would have been able to make no defense at all.

Now, why had they not so chosen? Hiero thought he knew the answer. For the first time since he had felt their presence directed at his own, a grim smile crossed his lips.

The hunters were growing impatient now. He could feel the irritation coming to him almost as a palpable wave. Why did he not come down from his perch and offer his naked throat? The irritation was growing into anger, and Hiero could feel the heat of the frustrated rage rising from below. There would be some action soon. These beings were not patient at all when thwarted. So be it. He had the fear under perfect control now, holding it in easy check even while he examined the effects on his nerves and body chemistry. He was angry himself now, but in a cold state of anger. Somebody was going to get a sharp lesson in very short order.