Hiero Desteen (Omnibus) (9 page)

Toward noon, the ground became boggy and moist. It was obvious that they were heading into either a swamp or the margin of some body of water. Hiero called a halt, stopped on a patch of dry ground, and got out his maps, bringing the bear over to consult with him while Klootz was turned loose to browse.

Ahead of them lay an enormous area, roughly given on one of the Abbey maps as a vast marsh, called by some the Palood, and both trackless and unknown. The bear's knowledge also stopped here, although he agreed with the map in that he felt the Inland Sea or a great water of some kind lay to the south, beyond a wide expanse of fen. But he had never in his life, not a long one in Hiero's opinion, traveled so far down into the unknown. Most of his information seemed to be secondhand, as indeed was the man's.

Reflecting, the priest decided to try a scan with the crystal and also to cast the symbols. He got them out, said his prayers, put on his vestments, and instructed the two animals not to disturb him.

Fixing his mind on the route ahead and staring into the crystal, he sent his thoughts out in search of a pair of eyes.

His first vision was disappointing. He found himself looking at a desolate stretch of water from very low down, apparently almost in the water itself. Nor could he see very well, since the frog, turtle, or whatever, whose eyes he had borrowed, was lurking behind a clump of tall reeds and, in addition, possessed short-range vision. Shutting his own eyes, Hiero willed a vision change, this time emphasizing height, distance, and clarity of sight. Surely, he felt, there must be a hawk or some other bird of prey quartering back and forth over the open water and marshes ahead of them.

Once again the crystal cleared, and this time the mental emphasis on height had paid off, but not at all in the way Hiero had planned!

He was indeed very high up, perhaps a mile or more, and he had an instant to note the land spread out below, the pines of the Taig fading into the great swamp, and, far off, the gleam of what could only be the Inland Sea. And his vision was now superb, much too superb! The highly intelligent mind whose eyes he had inadvertently borrowed was in turn aware of
him
instantly, and as it became aware, tired at once to find out who, what, and where he was. He was somehow linked to a furious brain which, cold and repellent though it was, was nonetheless almost identical to his own, seeking with every ounce of its being to locate his present position.

Just as Hiero broke the connection with a wrench which hurt his head, a last, close-up look through the enemy eyes showed the rounded nose of a strange craft, a thing like a huge bullet, and at the edges of his vision the beginnings of great wings, made of something like painted wood.

Flight by men was no more than a present dream of the Abbey scientists, but they were well aware that it had been a part of worldwide technology in the ancient past, and they had no doubt it could be and would be rediscovered when more urgent matters had been disposed of first. But here it was, in the hands of the Unclean! High in the blue sky of the Taig, evil and unsuspected eyes marked all the land below and now sought to trace the travelers and pin them down. And Hiero had led a deadly watcher right to his present position, at least in a way which would allow more rapid pursuit to be organized! He sprang to his feet.

"Lie down," he vocally ordered the bull, and led him under a dense clump of fir trees and with his free hand pushed Gorm the same way, urging them on. as best he could himself. The bear understood at once and made no effort to talk with his brain. The trained morse and the untrained bear both had got the feeling of immediate and pressing danger and needed little urging to do what they were told.

Lying against the bull's side, Hiero kept the thrower cocked and ready across his outstretched legs. It was really only accurate for about three hundred feet, but it could be used for double that, and it was the most powerful weapon he had. Straining his eyes up through the canopy of needles and branches, he sought for his enemy. Presently, he Saw it. Quite far up, in lazy circles, a black shape like a great falcon soared and sailed, now drifting out of sight and now moving back. The priest unpacked his seldom-used far looker, a short brass telescope, and tried to see how much of the peril he could discern. The machine, in fact an unpowered glider, a thing Hiero could not comprehend, stayed too high, however; and beyond seeing that the wings had a light bend backward, thus simulating a real bird's wings, he could learn little.
This, then, must be the thing the bear had tried to describe,
he reflected. The hunt had not been thrown off at all, but merely diffused, and despite the distance he thought he had put between them and himself, the forces of the Unclean were still on his track. He looked dismally at the ground and then at his left hand, still clenched into a brown fist.

A fist! He peered quickly out into the little clearing they had just left. The casting bowl and the pieces still lay there, and so did the crystal. He had scurried, under cover so quickly he had completely forgotten them. He was allowing the enemy to frighten him, to shake his inner confidence. He said a quick, mathematical table as a prayer and then looked down, at his now open hand and the three symbols which he had unconsciously caught up while battling in the mind of the flier high above.

First, the little Fish, an unmistakable, fork-tailed carving. It meant water, any kind of water. It also meant, or could mean, boats, docks, nets, lines, salt, and other watery concerns. It was also one of the symbols of male virility. The second symbol was the tiny Spear. It meant war, up to and including fighting of all kinds; also any dangerous hunt. The last sign was an odd one, and he had to think back to his early classwork for its various meanings, since it had never once before come to his hand, not in all his many wanderings. It was a cross, a tiny symbol of seven-millennium-old Christianity, but super-imposed on its center, where the arms joined, was the oval carving of a miniature eye. The Cross and the Eye! He felt a shiver run up his spine. This rarely turned-up symbol stood for the presence of a spiritual evil, something which menaced not just the body but the very soul.

He laid the three symbols gently on the ground and darted a look at the sky. The flier was still visible, but only just, now far away, at the limit of Hiero's vision to the north. The priest darted out into the open and retrieved the bowl and also the crystal on its wooden base. Not even an eagle could have seen a movement at that distance, he felt.

Repacking his apparatus in the bag while Klootz mumbled over his cud and the bear snored, utterly relaxed in an instant nap, the priest turned the three symbols over in his mind. He was heading for water. Even if he had tried to turn back, it was almost certainly too late. The flier knew roughly where he was and the pursuit must already have been summoned. He dared not use his looted rod to listen, for fear of being detected himself, but he was sure the ether was thrilling with the summons and exhortations of the Unclean. Leemutes no doubt were pouring from various dens in the North. But what of the South? Was a trap being laid there, or perhaps many?

The Fish, the Spear, and the Eyed Cross! Water, battle, and the coming of some spiritual bane or woe. But was that the right reading? As always, the little signs were chancy to interpret. The last sign, the Eyed Cross, could mean a grim psychic menace, but it could also mean a great sin upon the caster's own conscience, a mortal sin, in fact.
Be damned to that,
Hiero said angrily to himself. He had confessed before leaving the Republic, to Abbot Demero, in fact. And telling Leolane d'Ondote that she was going to be neither his first, second nor indeed any other wife, and further, that her talents were exclusively prone was
not
a mortal sin, even if more than a trifle rude. That was the heaviest guilt currently on his mind.

Suppose, now, that the Spear meant a hunt and the Fish a boat? No, that was silly in his present condition. Well, then, what about other possibilities? Through the long afternoon, he turned over and over in his mind the various combinations of the three pieces. But the Eyed Cross dominated his thoughts. Deep inside him was the certain knowledge that he was not in mortal sin and that he was instead approaching some dread encounter with a great evil of the Unclean.

Determined not to expose himself to the man, Leemute or whatever, which rode the sky machine, he waited with his two allies until the sun was only a dim, red glow in the far West. Then they sallied out from the gloom of the firs and headed south into the muddy paths between the last straggling trees of the Taig.

Under the evening stars, gleaming pools of water began to appear and soon grew more frequent. The trees grew less in size, and the pines now vanished at last. Great spatterdocks and overgrown marsh plants, looming oddly in the night, began to replace them. Strange and lovely perfumes came from pale night flowers growing on the surface of muddy pools, and rank stenches came from other and seemingly identical pools. Ferns, too, were increasingly large, often as high or higher than Klootz's head, and they grew in great black clumps, some so thick that the travelers had to detour around them. The air had been growing steadily warmer for the last few days, but now it was suddenly both warm and damp, and even when perfumed, carrying a hint of fetid decay and overripe growth under the pleasant scents. They had left the Taig and its cool breezes for good and were now breathing the air of the Palood, the monster-haunted fen which for league upon league bordered the northern edge of the Inland Sea. It was a trackless, horribly dangerous waste, and only roughly defined on any map.

Even as Hiero recalled all this, a hideous, croaking bellow rang out somewhere ahead of them. It drowned the normal noises of the night, the constant hum of the swarms of insects, and the chorus of small frogs by sheer vibration.

Klootz jerked to a standstill, and ahead of them in the dark, Gorm halted like the grotesque shadow of a distorted pointer, one foot raised, dripping from a pool of dark water. For a moment they listened and then, when no other sound came, began to move cautiously onward. Hiero's face and hands were now smeared with an insect-repelling grease, but the cloud of bugs still penetrated his clothes, and it was a sore trial not to be able to curse wholeheartedly. They had gone only a hundred feet or so when the grunting roar again broke out in the moist dark ahead of them. With it came a prodigious "splat," as if some vast platter had been slammed down hard into soft mud. The myriad small animal voices of the marsh, the night birds, frogs, and other things fell silent. Only the humming drone of millions of mosquitoes and gnats went on. The three again paused, but this time not for so long.

Behind
them another awful bellow exploded in the night. The sheer volume of the second cry had to make the bulk of its owner simply enormous. And it seemed to be closer than the one in front.

Hiero looked desperately about. They were in shadows on the edge of a big patch of open, shiny mud, well lit by the bright stars above and the half-full moon. To their left and in front was only the mud, but to their right, some dark clump of vegetation rose against the stars.

Get to the right quickly,
he sent to the bear and the morse.
Into those bushes or plants and lie down again. We can't face these things!

They had barely begun to move when the growth parted on the far side of the mud patch and a face out of nightmare leered over and down at them from a hundred feet away. Dimly, Hiero could see, the scientist still operating in his mind, that a frog or a three-quarter-grown tadpole might possibly have been its remote progenitor. The great opalescent eyes were set ten feet apart on the blunt, slimy head. The thing squatted many yards off the mud on monstrous, bowed forelegs, and horny claws tipped the giant toes. The incredible gape of the jaws now gleamed with lines of giant fangs, teeth such as no frog ever had, like a forest of ivory needles, each a foot long, glistening in the moonlight.

The morse did not move, and Gorm, almost paralyzed with fear, shrank against one of his rigid forelegs. The priest raised the thrower and took careful aim, saying a silent prayer as he did so. Even the powerful charge of the small rocket shells was simply not designed for this scale of being. Under his body, Hiero felt the bull gathering himself for an enormous leap. Klootz's hindquarters tensed and sank down.

Wait!
Hiero sent, just as Klootz was about to explode like a coiled spring. The man had seen the attention of the monstrosity suddenly waver. It crouched as he watched, and its eyes and head shifted to the left and behind them.

Then, suddenly, it just took off. The pillarlike hind legs, no doubt the legacy of some pre-Death ranid ancestor, hurled the whole bulk of the titan, long tail trailing, past and
over
the three shrinking mammals. Before they could even blink, the weight of what must have been fifteen tons hit the mucky ground well behind them. The shock wave made the mud rise in a mighty wave, and at the same time an incredible flailing uproar broke out, great limbs kicking and tremendous bodies straining, while showers of plant matter and acres of muck were hurled into the night air. The vast creature had fallen upon another of its own kind, Hiero realized, suddenly remembering the second awful cry which had come in from their rear.

It took little urging to get Gorm and the morse away from the appalling sounds of the struggle. They galloped away through mud and slime, splashing recklessly through several shallow lagoons and over reeking patches of some evil-smelling herbage. Finally the uproar died away in the distance and Hiero commanded a halt. They now stood on a long, raised bar of packed, dried reeds, jammed together by some floor of a past year, and listened to the night.

The insect and frog chorus reverberated, but otherwise nothing else sounded or moved beneath the white moon, save for the cry of a startled heron which they disturbed. They could see quite a way in several directions, the principal obstacles to viewing now consisting of great reeds, whose clumps had been steadily increasing as they progressed. Some of the smooth stalks were two feet around, and the feathery tops towered up far over the soft up-thrust points of Klootz's antlers. Between the reeds grew many huge mallows and stands of giant arrowweed, the triangular leaves of the latter dipping gently like fans in the gentle breeze. Lanes of still moonlit water stretched between the patches of mud and plant life, some opening into large ponds, others winding out of sight around distant corners. It was a scene of strange beauty, and even the ever-present smells of the dissolving marsh gases and rotting vegetation did not really detract from it, Hiero thought as he gazed.