Beast Master's Planet: Omnibus of Beast Master and Lord of Thunder (Beastmaster) (24 page)

The Terran went slowly, conserving his strength, accepting the Norbie’s assistance over rough places. The wind was changing, bearing with it a low muttering of sound that aped the roll of thunder. They reached a ledge that Gorgol turned to follow, one hand ready to lead or support the Terran. And that narrow and perilous path took them around the spur of an outcrop, through an arch of stone, onto a wider platform where there was a muddle of dried sticks under an overhang.

Gorgol kicked at some of the rubbish to clear a path and signed:

“Evil flyer.”

This must have been the eyrie from which he had pursued the wounded monster on the day it led him into the valley of the Sealed Caves. But by all indications the bird had had no mate, nor had its untidy nesting place been claimed by another.

The nest ledge was above another. With Gorgol’s hand on his belt, Storm swung over by one band and dropped to this, wondering how often he could equal that feat if called upon to do so tonight. However, this cutting led on around the side of the cliff and there was the red of fire beyond, a red that suddenly puffed vivid sparks of green into the air, along with a suffocating odor.

“Wizards!” Gorgol’s fingers wriggled.

As the green sparks cleared, Storm discovered that he was perched over a table-topped plateau, bare of any vegetation, but mounded here and there by weather-carved rocks, which assumed odd shapes in the semidarkness. Lashed to two such pillars were four men—settlers by their dress—while the space about the fire was crowded by squatting Norbies, intent upon the actions of two of their number who
paced back and forth around the circle of the flames, beating on small tambors they held in their hands, so producing that deep thunder mutter.

Storm studied the scene. Either the Nitra felt secure from attack here or their sentries were very well hidden. He could detect none from his present stand. But there were men squatting beside the pillars to which the prisoners were bound, one each at the very feet of the captives.

“I am going in—” he signaled to Gorgol.

He beamed the silent summons to Baku who must be cruising overhead, felt Surra press reassuringly against him. Then the Terran made a slow descent of the drop immediately below him. As his boots struck the surface of the plateau he shouted aloud the rallying call of the team.

“Saaaaaaaa—”

Out of the black sky Baku dropped, a thing that was a feathered part of the night endowed with separate life. Storm staggered a step or two as she set her claws in the blanket on his shoulder, resting her weight above the green wound. But he recovered swiftly and straightened under that necessary burden.

Then, with Hing wary against his breast, her eyes as bright as his necklace, and Surra, soft-footed beside him, showing her fangs in a snarl that wrinkled her lips, Storm walked confidently into the full light of the fire.

“Comes now the Monster Slayer, wearing this one’s moccasins,

Wearing the body of the storm born one.

Comes now the Monster Slayer, bowstring extended,

Arrow notched upon it for the flying—

Comes now the Monster Slayer—ready for battle—”

S

The Terran did not see the Nitra rows split apart to make him a pathway to the edge of the fire. He was not truly aware of anything except the song and the power and the fact that, at this moment, Hosteen Storm was a small but well-fitting part of something much greater than any one man could aspire to be—

He stood still now, bracing himself under the weight of Baku, not noting the pain that weight brought him. Before him was a blue-horned Nitra wizard, his tambor drum raised. But the native was no longer beating it, instead he was staring at this apparition out of the night.

“Ahuuuuuu!” Storm’s voice spiraled up in the old war cry of his desert raiding people. “Ahuuuuuu!”

The Nitra wizard thumped his drum, was answered by a roll of muted thunder. However, there was a hesitation in that reply, which
Storm sensed more than saw. The native made talk in his own high-pitched voice. To that the Terran did not reply with finger-talk. This was no time to betray kinship with the settlers and their ways. He turned to face the four prisoners, saw recognition leap to life in Logan’s eyes, surprise dawn in Quade’s.

“Power is in this one’s arm—power is in this one,

The Monster Slayer wears now this one’s body—

He walks in this one—”

Surra moved with Storm, matching her soft padding to his deliberate pace. He released Hing from his hold. The meerkat scurried, a gray shadow touched to life by the fire, to the nearest pillar. Rising on her hind legs, she attacked the prisoners’ bonds with teeth and claws. Storm gestured and Surra moved as quickly to Logan and his partner at the other post, to chew at the hide thongs about their bodies.

The Nitra priest squalled like an enraged yoris and sprang at Storm shaking his tambor. Baku mantled, her fierce eyes on the native, screaming with rage. She took off into the air and came down to do as she seldom did, attack from ground level, as she had faced the zamle in Krotag’s village. And the Nitra gave ground before her bristling fury, so that bird drove man around the fire and there was a shrilling chorus of wonder from the watching warriors.

“Power is now ours!” Storm exulted in a song perhaps only one other within hearing could understand. But if the words were unknown the meaning was clear and as he moved forward again the Nitra cowered away from him.

Quade stepped away from the pillar where he had been bound and Storm saw him shake off cut thongs. Gorgol had played his part back in the shadows. The settler jumped to catch the staggering Logan, but the younger man’s hand rested on Surra’s head for a moment—an attention the big cat had never before permitted from any save Storm—and he was once more steady on his feet.

“Let us go forth in power—” The Terran’s voice arose above the screaming rage of Baku. Surra led the retreat with Quade supporting his son, the riders crowding behind. Hing ran to Storm and climbed his leg, hooking her claws in his breeches.

“Go forth in power—” Storm put full urgency into that order. He moved between the retreating men and the restless Nitra. How long he could hold the natives Storm had no idea, but at this moment he had no doubts that he
could
hold them. Only a very few times in his life had the Terran experienced this inner rightness, this being a part of a bigger pattern that was meant to work smoothly. Once when he first had his orders obeyed as team leader by the animals and Baku—twice during his service days when that team carried through a difficult assignment with perfect precision. But this in its way was again different, for the power flowed through him alone.

“This one walks in power—

This one carries power—

This one works the will of the Old Ones,

The Old Ones who walk in beauty,

This one serves—”

The rescued had gone beyond the rim of the firelight.

“Saaaaaa—”

Baku came to him. The Norbie wizard had a bleeding gash on his forearm and he no longer held the tambor. There was bitter hatred in his eyes and a knife ready in his hand. As Baku settled again on Storm’s shoulder the Nitra followed her in the arching spring of an attacking yoris.

He reached Storm only to go down with the stiff jerk of a man who had been rayed. And from the massed warriors there arose a wailing cry. It was then that Storm laughed. This was a night in which nothing could go wrong! Gorgol had used his rod at the right moment as he had earlier used his knife. They were all riding one of the waves of phenomenal luck that sometimes overtakes tides of action and can be used to carry a man on their crest until he is able to achieve the impossible. The Singers were right. At that moment full belief in the unseen powers of his people flooded through Storm, burning away all doubts. He was truly possessed and no Nitra—no—nor Xik—could stand successfully against him!

He withdrew stride by stride backwards to the edge of the light where he must climb to the heights.

“Over here, Storm—” came a low call just before the Nitra pack screeched their fear and anger aloud—though no warrior ventured in pursuit. A hand caught his arm, pulled him up to the cliff wall.

“Where did you come from?” Quade demanded. “We thought you were dead!”

Storm laughed again. The intoxication that filled him still bubbled.

“Far from dead,” he said. “But we had better get out of here before they recover nerve enough to come hunting—”

His exultation held as they climbed back to the ledge of the deserted nest, worked their way around to the valley of the Sealed Cave. But at the mouth of that same cave he halted.

“Listen!” His tone was so sharply commanding that the men about him were silent.

And it was not so much a noise that they heard as a vibration, which came to them through the walls of stone, from the earth under their feet.

“The Xik ship!” Storm knew that trembling of old. He had sheltered in hiding to watch the enemy take-off from hidden ports he had been sent to locate and harass. Always there had been that shaking of the earth as the alien ships had warmed to their take-off.

“What—?” Quade demanded.

“The Xik ship—it is getting ready to take off. They may be leaving Arzor!”

Quade, one arm about Logan, put his other hand to the cliff surface.

“What a vibration!”

Too much so. Storm was conscious of that suddenly. The ship he had seen in the hidden valley was no intergalactic transport—it was hardly larger than a converted scout. This tearing was too much! Another Xik craft hidden somewhere near? Only now that throbbing came raggedly—

There was a roar that filled the night, a torch of light that shot miles high from the mountains. Around them the cliffs trembled,
miniature landslips started, and they crouched together, men and animals, in a terrified huddle.

“The tubes—they must have blown!” Storm was on his feet again, his hand pressing against his shoulder where the sharp bite of pain gnawed once more. He had been torn out of his self-hypnotism, thrown into the weariness of near exhaustion.

“What tubes?” Logan’s question came thinly as if some muffling veil hung between them.

“The Xiks had their ship partly buried for concealment. They were digging her out when you escaped. But if they were pressed for time they might have tried to take her up without being sure of thoroughly clean tubes—or else”—Storm glanced down at the ball of whimpering fur he held, one sorely frightened meerkat—“or else Hing pulled one of her tricks. When they tried to lift the ship, the tubes blasted it wide open!”

“So they blew themselves up!” Brad Quade squared his shoulders. “But there might be something to see to over there, perhaps some of our boys were involved and need help. It might be well to check—”

“One of those other grills in the garden cave—” Logan cut in weakly. “There was a northwestern one pointing in the right direction. If we could find another tunnel from that it would take us straight through—”

Whatever shaking up the mountain had received, the garden cavern remained apparently untouched. Though the newcomers were awed by the bits of strange worlds divided by the black paths, they did not linger. Gorgol sped ahead, the rest trying to match his pace. A quarter of the way around the cavern they came to the grill Logan had found on his first exploration.

They mastered the latch and were fronting another tunnel which, with its curiously dead air and blackness, engulfed them wholly, for this time there was no torch to light the way. Surra pressed on with Gorgol, eyes of cat and native not so baffled by the gloom, the others strung out behind. All were driven by a gnawing desire to be through this passage and out into the normal world of Arzor once again.

It was easy to lose one’s sense of direction here in the dark and the tunnel did not run straight. Whether it followed the easy path of
some natural fault in the mountain, or whether its long-ago builders had intended the turns to bewilder, Storm could not guess. But after two twists, he was at sea. For all he could determine, they might be heading back into the cavern they had just left. Baku moved restlessly on his shoulder, he lurched to one side, scraping against the unseen wall for support, hearing close by the heavy breathing of one of his companions, and then Logan’s assurance, fiercely uttered to his father, that he could keep up in spite of his injured leg.

Another twist, and a spark in the dark ahead, a light that grew to a reflected glow as if some giant fire raged beyond. They hurried on at that promise of escape.

Now the off-worlders caught up with Gorgol and the cat, to look out into a well of fire. Those flames ate along the terraces of the valley of the ship. And the heat from the conflagration beat in at them. Gorgol wriggled through a slit of door and Storm edged after him, giving Baku her flight signal. If there were any way out along the heights, she would find it for them.

Seeing that whirl of flames below, the Terran believed that nothing within that bowl of mountain walls could have survived the blowup of the overdriven ship. Sparks came up in the suck of air as they edged about the small walled space that long ago might have been a sentry point, to put a crag between them and the full force of the heat.

Even here the light approached that of day and they discovered Surra at the head of a flight of stairs. They were hardly more than niches gnawed away by the elements, down which a man could edge only at his peril. But they were a way down with the full bulk of the peak between them and the raging inferno of the blasted valley.