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gripping Larry’s arm. “In ten minutes this whole part of the woods will be alive with them! Come on!”

He ran—feeling twigs catch and hold at his clothing, stumbling into burrows and ridges, his breathcoming short in the bitter cold. Before him Kennard dodged and twisted, half doubling back once andagain, plunging through the trackless trees, and Larry, stumbling and racing in desperate haste to keep up,his head pounding, fled after him.

It seemed hours before Kennard dropped into a little hollow made by the fallen branches of a tree. Larrydropped at his side, his head falling forward against the icy-wet grass. For a few moments all that hecould do was to breathe. Slowly the pounding of his heart calmed to something like normal and thedarkness cleared from before his eyes. He raised himself half on his elbow, but Kennard jerked himdown again.

“Lie flat!”

Larry was only too glad to obey. The world was still spinning; after a moment it spun completely away.

When he came up to consciousness again, Kennard was kneeling at his side, head raised, his ear cockedfor the wind.

“They may have trackers on our trail,” he said, tersely. “I thought I heard— Listen!”

At first Larry’s ears, not trained to woodcraft, heard nothing. Then, very far away, lifting and rising in along eerie wail, a shrill banshee scream that grew in intensity until his ears vibrated with the sound and heclasped his hands to his head to shut out the sheer torture of the noise. It faded away; rose again inanother siren wail. He looked at Kennard; the older boy was stark white.

“What is it?” Larry whispered.

“Banshees,” Kennard said, and his voice was a gasp. “They can track anything that lives—and they’ll scent our body warmth. If they get wind of us we’re done for!” He swore, gasping, his voice dying away in a half-sob. “Damn Cyrillon—damn him and his whole evil crew—Zandru whip them with scorpions in his seventh hell—Naotalba twist their feet on their ankles—” His voice rose to a half-scream of hysteria. He looked white with exhaustion. Larry gripped his shoulders and shook him, hard.

“That won’t help! What will?”

Kennard gasped and was silent. Slowly the color came back into his face and he listened, motionless, to

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the siren wail that rose and fell.

“About a mile off,” he said tersely, “but they run like the wind. If we could change our smell—”

“They’re probably tracking by my clothing-smell,” Larry said. “They took away my cloak. If I—”

Kennard had risen; he darted forward, suddenly, and fell into a bank of grayish shrubs. For a moment Larry, watching him roll and writhe in the leaves, thought that the hardships of the mountain journey haddriven the Darkovan boy out of his wits. But when Kennard sat up his face, though ashen, was calm.

“Come here and roll in this,” he ordered, “smear it all over your boots especially—”

Suddenly getting the idea, Larry grabbed handfuls of the leaves. They stung his hands with their furryneedles, but he followed the older boy’s example, daubing the leaves on face and hands, crushing theirjuice into clothing and boots. The leaves had a pungent, acrid smell that brought tears to his eyes like rawonions; but he crushed handfuls of the leaves over his boots and legs.

“This might or might not work,” Kennard said, “but it gives us a bare chance—unless the smell of this

stuff is like catnip to a kitten for those devilish things. If I knew more about them—”

“What are they ?”

“Birds. Huge things—taller than a tall man, with long trailing thin wings—they can’t fly. Their claws could rip your guts out at a stroke. They’re blind, and normally they live in the mountain snows, and can scent anything warm that moves. And they scream like—well, like banshees.”

All the time he spoke, he and Larry were crushing the leaves, rubbing them into their skin and hair,soaking their clothing with the juice. The odor was sickening, and Larry thought secretly that anythingwith any sense of smell at all could trace them for miles, but perhaps the banshees were like Terranbloodhounds, set on by a particular smell and trained not to follow any other.

“Zandru alone knows how Cyrillon and his hordes managed to train those devilish things,” Kennard muttered. “Listen—they’re coming nearer. Come on. We’ll have to run for it again, but try to move quietly.”

They moved off through the brushwood again, working their way slowly up the hill, Larry trying to movesoftly; but he heard dead twigs snap beneath his feet, dry leaves crackle, the creak of branches as hemoved against them. In contrast, Kennard moved as lightly as a leaf. And ever behind them the shrillbanshee howl rose, swelled, died away and rose again, throbbing until it seemed to fill all space, till Larryfelt he must scream with the noise that vibrated his eardrums and went rolling around in his skull untilthere was no room for anything but pulsing agony.

The path they were following began to rise, steeply now, and he had to catch at twigs and brushwood,and brace his feet against rocks, to force his way up the rising slope. His clothes were tattered, his facetorn, and the stink of the gray leaves was all around them. The slope was in deep shadow; it was growingbitterly cold, and above them the thick evening fog was deepening, till Larry could hardly see Kennard’sback, a few feet before him. They struggled up the slope and plunged down into a little valley, where Kennard’s pace slackened somewhat and he waited for Larry to catch up with him. Larry breathed hard,pressing his hands to his aching skull to shut out the banshee noise.

It lessened for a moment, died away in a sort of puzzled silence; began in a series of fresh yelps and

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wails, then faded out again. It was dimming with distance; Kennard, his face only a blur in the gathering

fog, sighed and fell, exhausted, to the ground.

“We can rest a minute, but not too long,” he warned.

Larry fell forward, dropping instantly into dead sleep. It seemed only a moment later—but it was blackdark and a fine drizzling rain was falling and soaking them—that Kennard shook him awake again. Thebanshee howls were again filling the air—and
 
on this side of the slope
 
!

“They must have found the patch of
eris
 
leaves and figured out what we’d done,” he said, his voice dragging between his teeth, “and, of course, that stuff leaves a scent that a broken-down mule could follow from here to Nevarsin!”

Larry strained his eyes to see through the thin darkness. Far down the slope there seemed a glint, just apale glimmer in the moonlight. “Is there a stream at the bottom of the valley?”

“There might be. If there is—” Kennard was swaying with weariness. Larry, though aching in every muscle, found that the last traces of the drug were gone from his mind, and the brief sleep had refreshed him. He put his arm around Kennard’s shoulders and guided the other boy’s stumbling steps. “If we can get into the water—”

“They’ll figure that trick out too,” Kennard said hopelessly, and Larry felt him shudder, a deep thing that racked his bones. He pointed upward, and Larry followed his gaze. At the top of the slope, outlined against the sky, was a sight to freeze the marrow of his bones.

Bird? Surely no bird ever had that great gaunt outline, those drooping wings like a huge flapping cloak,the skull-like head that dripped a great phosphorescent red-glowing beak. The apparition craned a longdark neck and a dreadful throbbing cry vibrated to air-filling intensity.

Larry felt Kennard go rigid on his arm; the boy was staring upward, fixedly, like a bird hypnotized by aweaving snake.

But to Larry it was just another Darkovan horror; dreadful indeed—but he had seen so many horrors hewas numb. He grabbed Kennard, and plunged with him down the slope, toward the distant glimmer. Thebanshee howl rose and fell, rose and fell on their heels, as they plunged through underbrush, careless nowof noise or direction. The gleam of water loomed before them. They plunged in, fell full length with asplash, struggled up and ran, splashing, racing, stumbling on stones. Twice Larry measured his length inthe shallow icy stream and his clothing stiffened and froze in the icy air, but he dared not slacken hisspeed. The banshee howl grew, louder and louder, then slackened again in a puzzled, yelping wail, analmost plaintive series of cheated whimpers. It seemed to run round in circles. It was joined by furtherhowls, yelps and whimpers. They splashed along in the stream for what seemed hours, and Larry’s feetwere like lumps of ice. Kennard was stumbling; he fell again and again to his knees and the last time hefell with his head on the bank and lay still. None of Larry’s urging could make him rise. The Darkovan ladhad simply reached the end of his fantastic endurance.

Larry dragged him out, on the far side of the stream, hauled him into the shelter of the forest, and satthere listening to the gradually diminishing wails and yelps of the frustrated banshees. Far away on theslope he saw torches and lights. They were beating the bushes, but with their tracking birds cheated,there was no way to follow their escaped prey. But would they pick up the scent again downstream? Larry, conscious that he was famished, remembered that a day or two ago—before the drugging—hehad thrust a piece of the coarse bread into his pocket. He hauled it out and began to gnaw on it; then,

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remembering, broke it in half and stowed the other half in his other pocket for Kennard. As he did so, his hands touched metal, and he felt the smooth outline of his Terran medical kit. Small as it was, it probably contained nothing for his scratches and bruises, but—

Of course! He pulled urgently at Kennard’s hand; when the Darkovan boy stirred and moaned, he putthe bread in his hand, then whispered, “Listen. I think we can outwit them even if they pick up our scentdownstream. Here. Eat that, and then listen!” He was fumbling in the dark, by touch, in his medical kit. He found the half-empty tube of burn ointment he had used after the fire, unscrewed the cap and smelledthe sharp, unfamiliar chemical smell.

“This should puzzle them for a while,” he said, smearing a thin layer of the stuff, first on his boots and then on Kennard’s. Kennard, munching the bread, nodded in approval. “They might pick up
 
eris
 
leaves. Not this stuff.”

They rested a little, then began cautiously to crawl up the far slope. There was plenty of cover, thoughthe plants and thorny bushes of the underbrush tore at their faces and hands. Kennard’s leatherriding-breeches did not suffer so badly as Larry’s cloth ones, but their hands and faces were torn andbleeding, and the red sun was beginning to thin away the dawn clouds, before they reached the summit ofthe slope and lay on the rocks exhausted, too weary to move another step. Behind them, in the valleythey had left, there seemed no sign of men or banshees.

“They may have called off the hunt,” Kennard muttered, “Banshees are torpid in the sunlight—they’re

night-birds. We just might have got clean away.”

Huddling his cloak round him, he knelt and looked down into the far valley. It was a huge bowl of land,filled to the brim with layered forest. Near the top, where they were, there was underbrush and lowscrubby conifers, and snow lay in thin patches in hollows of the ground where the sun had not warmed. Lower down were tall trees and thick brushwood, while the valley was thick with uncleared forest. Not ahouse, not a farm, not a cleared space of land, not even a moving figure. Only the wheeling of a hawkabove them, and the silent trees below them, moved in response to their dragging steps. They hadescaped Cyrillon’s castle. But in the growing red light, their eyes met, and the same thought was in themboth.

They had escaped bandits and banshees. But they were hundreds of miles from safe, knowncountry—alone, on foot, almost weaponless, in the great trackless unexplored forests of the wildest partof Darkover.

They were alive.

And that was just about all that they could say.

X

«^»

THE SUN CLIMBED higher and higher. In the high hollow where they lay, a little cold sun penetratedtheir retreat, and finally Kennard stirred. He took off his cloak and spread it in the sun to dry, thenstripped to the skin and gestured to Larry to do likewise. When Larry, shivering, hesitated, Kennard saidharshly, “Wet clothes will freeze you faster than cold skin. And take off your boots and dry yourstockings.”

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Larry obeyed, shivering, crouching in the lee of a sun-warmed rock. While their clothes dried in thebitter wind of the heights, they took stock.