Beast Master's Planet: Omnibus of Beast Master and Lord of Thunder (Beastmaster) (43 page)

The storm ended. But the stranger was still intent upon the board. He paced along it, sometimes pausing for long moments, inspecting this and that pattern of webbing. Once or twice he put out a finger to trace some loop of tube. And Hosteen thought that perhaps he was unfamiliar with the function of that particular hookup.

At last he came to the end of the platform nearest the Terran and stepped up upon a small dais. To his right now was another line of bulbs. Holding his hands a foot apart before those, the man brought palm against palm in sharp clap, as if applauding some triumph. Then—

Hosteen stepped away from the shadow of the machine that had sheltered him. The dais was empty, just as empty as if the man was as immaterial as that which had hunted them in the dry valley.

The Terran could accept his journey via the spiral path. But this was something else, more akin to the old magic that his grandfather had talked of before Terra became a roasted cinder.

He made himself mount the platform, go to the dais. There was no break in the flooring, no possible exit for a solid human body. Just as he had recoiled in spirit from the machines in the hall, so was he now repulsed by this device. Yet, as he had been impelled to follow the spiral path in the valley, so now his hands moved against his
will. He copied the gesture the stranger had used, palm met palm in a half-hearted clap.

Again the terrible giddiness of being nowhere on earth, or in any dimension known to his species, held him. But a spark of triumph battled fear—again he had used one of the tricks of this place boldly.

Hosteen opened his eyes. Ahead was daylight—not the artificial light of a cavern but true and honest sunlight. He was in a mountain tunnel heading to the outer world.

A murmur of sound ahead, and Hosteen dropped to his hands and knees, making the rest of that journey with all the caution of his Commando training. Daylight—the hour was well into morning he believed. Yet, there was no glare as there had been in the valley of the wedge or that was common in the country outside the wall of the Blue.

Had the devices of the Sealed Cave people put some film of protection between this taboo world and the blistering Dry sun? Had the same knowledge that had bored the tunnels and the caverns also brought weather control to the open? But this was no time for speculations.

Hosteen lay belly-flat at the tunnel mouth, then chose a crab-like crawl to take him out into the open and behind one of the abutments guarding the doorway.

Norbies were drawn up downslope, not in serried rows but in small groupings, each fronted by a flagged truce pole, headed by a Chief and a Drummer. Such a meeting of clans and tribes would amaze any settler. There were Norbies standing clan next to clan down there between whom there had been ceremonial blood feuds from long before the first Survey scout ship had discovered Arzor for Confederation star maps. Only a very big medicine could bring about such a truce against all ancient custom.

Shosonna, Nitra, Warpt, Ranag from the south—even Gousakla, and they were a coastal people who must have crossed a thousand miles at the worst season of the year to appear here. There were other totems of both clan and tribe Hosteen had never seen or heard described.

Counting, Hosteen made that tally of different poles more than a
hundred, and he knew he could not see them all without emerging from his hiding place. By rude reckoning, every tribe on this continent must be represented!

The Drummers were busy, the beat of their individual tambours blending into a rhythm that stirred the blood. Lean yellow bodies swayed back and forth, answering that call, though not a booted foot stirred. Hosteen could smell the fug of burned vegetation, could sight trails of smoke. Only recently the whips of lightning had again been laid about the shoulders of the mountain.

Thud—thud—a crescendo of sound. Then, after a final crash, silence. Into that silence fell a delicate counter-tapping—as rain might come in a more gentle fashion after the growl of thunder.

Into the open some distance below came the man from the hall of machines. His fingers played on the taut head of his own drum, making that thin trickle of sound. And his tapping was picked up by first one and then another of the medicine men in that company.

T

He began to speak, and he did not use the hand signs of the settlers. The twittering bird notes—which authorities had sworn could not be shaped by human vocal cords or lips—poured from him. He was talking to the Norbies in their own tongue!

Shrill cries broke his first pause. Truce poles were tossed in the air until the fluttering of their totem streamers whirled in a crazy dance of ribbon strips.

Hosteen’s mouth straightened into a hard line; his face was graven, without expresison, save that his eyes were watchful, as watchful as those of a man facing a death peril.

The signs were the same from world to world, race to race, species to species. This orator had the Norbies in the grip of a spell woven by his words. And he was inciting them to action! Their “big medicine” was working—alive! The trouble Quade and Kelson had smelled in the plains now walked openly in the Blue. Walked? No rather spoke with drum and voice—to urge what?

Hosteen’s own inability to understand more than the emotions being aroused was a torment. But his doubts were resolved. Magic, if you wanted to call it that—but something his own inheritance recognized—was drugging their minds to provide a free path for unreasoning action, which could be used by that man in the off-world uniform with a Norbie painted face.

“Ani’iihii—” Hosteen spat.

Sorcerer was the right name for this witch man shaping disaster and death out of the words, as the witches of Terra long ago had
shaped a man’s death from a lock of his hair ceremoniously buried in a grave.

The drums replied with a beat that awoke a response in Hosteen’s own hurrying blood. Just so, generations ago, halfway across the galaxy, had men of his own race drummed and danced before raiding. This was preparation for war.

And with such a collection of tribes, there could be only one answer to the identity of the intended enemy—the scattered holdings of the plains settlers, strung out thinly with leagues of open range land between each Center House, ripe for plucking by strike-and-run fighters. Norbies were warriors by tradition and training. It would take very little to turn them into an efficient guerrilla force that could wipe off-worlders from Arzor before they were aware of their danger.

The very nature of the country would fight for the natives at this season. Their carefully kept water secrets would make them far more mobile than any Patrol expeditionary force the settlers could call in.

Hosteen rubbed his forearm across his face. Nightmares out of the past provided spectres to follow a man for years. He had served on the fringe of a war that had involved not only worlds but solar systems, had seen the blotting out of nations and planets. Yes, the Patrol could be called in to end such a hit-and-run war—but afterwards, Arzor, as they knew it now, would cease to exist.

There was a final boom of drum—the orator was returning to the ledge of the tunnel, the Norbies ebbing back into the valley. Back to their village—to arm, to plan? Why? Hosteen could not pick the answer to that out of their twittering.

He worked a grenade out of his belt pouch. The stranger was on the ledge. Hosteen waited for a challenge, for some attack. But the other was staring straight before him, his eyes wide. He walked with a stiff, rocking pace. If he had locked the Norbies in some spell of eloquence, he was as tightly enchanted himself. Glancing neither to right nor left, he entered the passage.

This was the mountain on which the LB had landed. Hosteen watched the Norbies withdraw, tried to think. The LB—and Widders’ story of those weak signals picked up by line camp corns. Just
suppose the craft’s com could still broadcast! A message might be sent to alert the plains!

The stranger could be hunted later—but to get to the LB now was worth the risk.

Surra—Baku—Gorgol. None of them had been brought to the village while Logan and he had been there. Were the three still at large?

Hosteen sent out once more that unvoiced, unheard rallying call of the team—tried to locate some mental radiation from bird or cat to reinstate once again their tight compact, so that man, cat, and eagle would not be three alone and adrift but a weapon, a defense such as Arzor, with all its hidden secrets, did not know.

“Baku!” He sent thought spinning like a lasso into the sky, striving to reach the mind behind those falcon-sharp eyes. But there was no answer.

“Surra!” Now he deserted the upper spaces and withdrew to the ground in search of one walking velvet-footed. “Surra!”

The answer he had ceased to hope for came like a stab of fire.

“Where?” His lips shaped the word as the query flew back along that tenuous thread of thought connection.

Impression of dark—of rock-walled passages. The cat must be somewhere within the mountain. Yes, Surra was there. And she lay in wait for some living thing now moving toward her. The orator?

The frustration that had rasped Hosteen moments earlier vanished. He worked the numbed line of mental contact just as he had the fingers of his numbed hand. Surra was an important part of him; without her, the composite entity that was the team was crippled, helpless as a man shorn of some important sense organ.

And he knew from the quality of her response, fierce, demanding, that that that lack had been hers also.

“The one coming”—he sent his message—“trail but do not take. Keep in touch with me.”

Surra would take the stranger under surveillance. Hosteen was free to reach the LB. He swung down from the ledge and worked his way along the slope, using every bit of cover and scoutcraft he knew.

Drums again, faint—they must be in the village. He used a springy bush to lower himself into the clearing, where the sweet-sick scent of decay hung heavy. The offerings were still heaped about the rounded sides of the craft; the escape port on the top was closed.

Had it ever been opened or was the LB still sealed with a passenger list of dead men? The presence of the stranger argued that at least one of the castaways had escaped.

Hosteen climbed a sapling, which bent under his weight, allowing him to land near the tail. Slamming his hand down on the pressure lock of the hatch, he waited tensely.

With a squeak of protest, the port began to lift slowly. Hosteen’s one fear vanished as he seized the edge of the door and forced it straight up. The LB had opened after its landing on Arzor; he was not about to enter a tomb.

The interior space of such a craft was limited, and from abandon-ship drill in the Service he knew its layout. Pushing between two rows of acceleration bunks set against each wall, he reached the nose, where the auto and hand pilots and the com set were to be found.

Side lights had gone on when he opened the hatch, showing him the wiring was still in order. Hosteen hunched into the small space before the com. He flicked the switch to open and was rewarded with a promising click-click of an expanding broadcast aerial, the purr of a working com. With finger on button, he tapped out the message he had composed on the way downhill.

The landing signals of this ship had registered months ago on the pickups of two line camps. Only because those camps were rarely visited had the signals gone undetected so long. He tapped out his warning twice by hand, setting it so on a repeat wire. Now that would go on broadcasting at ten revolutions an hour until it was turned off, and he intended to see that was impossible unless the com or the ship was destroyed.

Hosteen made adjustments, resealed the shield panel, and then went to explore the rest of the craft in the faint hope of discovering a weapon. But the stores’ compartment was open and empty. Save for the plasta foam pads on the bunks, there was nothing left.

He was standing directly under the escape hatch, preparing to
leave, when a roll of thunder startled him. Only reflex action saved his life as he slammed his hand on the seal button of the port.

Thunder again, but now muted into a distant mutter by the protection of the hull. The LB trembled under-a blow. Hosteen scrambled for the pilot’s seat, thumbed on the visa-screen—to view a roaring holocaust. If the fire that had lashed the mountan before had spared the LB, it did so no longer. The craft shook and reeled under streams of flame.

Would the insulation intended for the protection of space flight hold against this fierce concentration of energy? The force of that attack was twisting the ship around, might push it on down the slope.

Had the broadcast from the com alerted the stranger in the mountain, the message been picked up by some device of that other civilization? Hosteen was sure that this attack came from the Sealed Cave armory.

Surra! Hosteen braced himself in the shuddering cabin as he strove to reach the cat. But once more he met only the solid barrier he had found that night when he had been prisoner in the Norbie village. Perhaps the fire cut off contact. A reasonable explanation if not a comforting one.

The LB was no longer on an even keel. Hosteen caught one of the stanchions supporting the nearest bunk. The visa-screen told him the whole craft was encased in wildly ranging flame. He was trapped with no defense but the walls of the ship.

He stretched out on a bunk and snapped the acceleration webbing to hold his body in place. If that bath of energy did roll the LB over a cliff, he could have that small protection.

The nose of the craft tilted down and the whole hull quivered as the dive picked up speed. Then there was a bone-wrenching crash as the ship met some obstruction head on. The visa-screen went blank. And the com—he thought that the com had not survived either. How many broadcasts had it made before the end? Enough for one full message to reach beyond the Peaks?