Daybreak—2250 A.D.

16. THE HUNTED AND THE HUNTERS

Again Fors was grateful for the mutation which had given him the keenness of his night sight. For almost an hour he had been wriggling down an ancient roadside ditch as a hanger-on of the small party of dark-skinned warriors whom Arskane now led. The broken surface of the nearby road was steel bright in the beams of the full moon, but he was sure that only he could see clearly what passed in the shadows beyond.

He was glad for the weight of bow and quiver across his shoulders-although the bow was the short, double-stringed weapon of the southerners and not the long one he was accustomed to. However, one sword was much like another and the new one at his belt already fitted his hand as if it had been forged to rest therein.

If it had not been for JarFs plan he could have been really happy in that hour. To follow Arskane as one of his own tribe-to be accepted without question by those around him-But he was now pledged to put an end to that by his own actions-as soon as the time was right. Jarl was scouting to the west, the same compulsion driving him. They might be able to rendezvous after their break away from the tribe or they might never see each other again. Fors sent a silent call to Lura. If they did strike out into the wilderness tonight he would have to depend upon her wits and instinct-even more than upon his own.

The old road curved around the base of a rise. Fors stopped-had he really seen a flicker of movement in a bush halfway up that hill? His hand fell on the ankle of the man before him and he pressed hard, knowing that that signal would be as swiftly passed down the line.

That flash of cream white, that must be Lura crossing the road and heading up. But what he had caught only the faintest glimpse of had been far above that. Lura should rout it cut-There was a sudden scurry on the slope and Fors saw the outline of a crouching body. The sharp line of the thing’s shoulders was only too familiar. “Beast Thing!”

Lura’s scream tore through the air drowning out the warning he shouted. The bushes threshed wildly at her attack. But she had had her instructions, not to kill now -only to harry and drive. The black thing snapped up out of hiding, arms flailing as the men around Fors went to their knees, arrows ready on strings. A cloud of feathered shafts flew. Most, Fors guessed, had fallen woefully short. Shooting up slope was always a tricky business.

The Beast Thing scuttled away over the crown of the hill at a desperate speed. And it was gone before other arrows could follow the first volley. Arskane edged along the line of disappointed archers to join Fors.

“Was that a scout?” he asked.

“Could be. They have always hunted in packs before. If it was a scout, it will now report.”

Arskane chewed the tip of his thumb thoughtfully. Fors knew the worries which plagued him now. Ambush-that was the worst fear. They knew so little of the tactics of the Beast Things-but lying in wait in the dark seemed to fit the nature of the foul creatures best. In the ruined cities they had always fought from cover when they could.

In the end Arskane did as Fors thought he would, gave the signal to push on until they reached the boundaries of their beat, one of the hills where the beacon had been heaped some days before. So they crawled on. Lura flanking the line of march. And they reached the beacon hill without interference. Once there, Arskane formally relieved the guard on duty.

The hour was close to dawn. A thin gray light gave ordinary trees and bushes a queer new life as if they were now cut off from the real world by some flimsy barrier. The beacon keepers had torn out or hacked away most of the brush and saplings, so that the crown of the hill was bare and one could see for a good range on all sides.

Fors located the camp by the river first and then set about noting other landmarks which might help him keep the proper course if he decided to make the break north soon. The men whom they had relieved were marching in fairly good order down the hill, ready to drop into the protection of the road ditch, when the last one in that line threw up his arms with a startled jerk and fell without a sound. The man nearest him spun around just in time to see him fall and started back to his aid, only to choke and go to his knees tearing at the dart quivering in his own throat.

They broke and ran back. But before they could reach the miserable shelter afforded by the beacon, two more died, Beast Thing steel in their contorted bodies. Only one lived to break through to the men above.

And they, arrows ready, stood cursing, unable to shoot at a foe which would not show itself.

Lura bounded out of cover below. She crowded up to Fors, her blue eyes wide. Once getting his attention her head swung meaningly from side to side. So, they were surrounded! Maybe it was already too late to play the game Jarl had set him. But even as that hope leaped he knew that he would have no escape-that this was just the right sort of background for his break through-that this would truly bring the Beast Things out on any trail he laid for them. He must openly desert Arskane-perhaps even to the southerner’s death!

“We are surrounded.” Tonelessly he passed on Lura’s report.

Arskane nodded. “That I thought when she came to us. Well, now we may be forced to the waiting game.” He turned to the men around him. “Down on your bellies! Crawl to the brush. We are clear targets to them now.”

But before those orders were out of his mouth, the man beside him gave a gasping cry and held out his arm, a dart embedded in its flesh. As one man they moved into what cover they could find, Arskane pulling the wounded tribesman with him. But the cover of the beacon was a sorry shield.

The worst was not being able to sight the enemy. If they had been able to fight back it would not have been such a strain on the nerves. Picked and seasoned warriors knew better than to waste arrows or empty tree glades where nothing moved. It would be a battle in which patience would mean the most.

Fors sent Lura on another scouting trip. He must learn if there was any gap in the line the Beast Things held. If there was he should cross, break out to start north. If he won through they would probably wait to see if he headed for the river camp before they followed. So he must give the impression from the first that he was confused-then the sport of driving him might draw a portion of them after him.

During the morning there were two more casualties. Arskane, on making the rounds from one hidden man to another, found one dead with a dart pinning him down, and another with a torn leg, bandaging his own wound. When he came back to Fors he was very sober.

“At noon the camp will send us relief. If we light the beacon in warning they will prepare to move camp and that may lead them straight into an ambush. But Karson thinks he remembers something of the old smoke talk and he has volunteered to try it. Only those who signal will be exposed to fire.” The southerner scowled at the silent woods. “We are but five now and two of those wounded. If we die and the tribe is saved-what does it matter?”

Fors fought his impulse to volunteer. He was sensitive to the slight hesitation with which Arskane regarded him when he did not answer. Then the southerner turned and crawled to the center of the beacon. Fors stirred. He might have gone after his companion had he not caught sight of something else which brought him into a crouch, tense and ready. Lura’s head showed for the slightest instant below. She had found the gap he had sent her to search for. Now he, too, began to work his way around the hill to a point just above that section.

His dash would lead him across an open space and he must not be brought down. If he could time it right his move might draw fire which would otherwise be concentrated on the men at the beacon. He licked dry lips. Bow and quiver must be left behind, leaving him only sword and hunting knife.

Yes, he had not been mistaken. Lura’s brown ears showed again in outline against a moss-grown rock. She was waiting for him. He gathered his feet under him, and, as an arrow from a bow, he dashed out of cover and zigzagged down the slope. There was a single shout of surprise from behind and then he was into the woods, Lura with him.

Now he was absorbed in the task at hand. He burst through a screen of small trees, making only the most elementary effort to hide his trail. Lura’s warning that they were now followed set his heart to pounding. Now -now it was just his own two feet, his hunting lore, and his sense of direction against all the cunning of the enemy. He must be a tempting morsel always just about to fall into the pursuers’ hands, and yet he must keep from capture and lead the run into Plains territory so that Can-trul might be provoked into action. As Jarl had outlined it the plan was as simple as it was deadly-but was it going to work?

There were short periods during the rest of the day when he could snatch some rest, always after Lura assured him that something still ran the trail behind. Once he dared verify that for himself, having climbed a cliff after crossing a stream. He lingered in a shallow crevice at the top long enough to see three gray shapes come out of the woods a half mile back, the first on all fours sniffing the ground as it came.

Three-out of how many? But the beacon must have warned the camp. He must think of nothing else now but his own task. If ever his eyes and ears served him well” they must do better than that now. As a fugitive gaining his second wind perhaps he would dare display a little more cunning. The Beast Things might accept the idea that sheer panic had brought him away from the beacon, but that would not prevent a greater show of caution now. He tried several of the simpler trail-hiding tricks and waited for Lura’s verdict. It was favorable, the chase was still on.

Some hours before evening he struck west, trying to intercept a line which must run to the beaver lake and so to CantruTs camp-unless the fire had driven the Plainsmen from that base. He ate as he went, berries and handfuls of ripe grain pulled from the ragged self-sown patches in the old fields. There were hard, half-ripe peaches in an old orchard he pounded through and he had enough to keep him going when washed down with water from brook and spring.

The night was the worst. He had to lay up for rest, swinging into the branches of a tree, close enough to an outcrop of rock to be able to leap away if the need came. Lura catnapped on that rock, her brown and cream melting into the weathered stone. He dozed and woke, to stretch cramped muscles and doze again. Before morning he moved twice, putting a mile between each resting place and choosing each for the ability to make a quick retreat.

When the gray of dawn caught him again he was lying flat on a bluff overhanging a stream he was sure was the outlet of the beaver lake. Pieces of charred wood caught among the boulders below proved that. The size of the stream had dwindled, perhaps the beavers had started repairs in the broken dam. Fors lay there, every aching joint, every exhauusted muscle protesting the move he was willing his body into making. It was as if he had been running for days-since they had left the ruined city they had been on the move with little or no rest. And none to look for in the immediate future either-

Luckily he was facing downstream, with his eyes on the moving surface, for now he saw what might have been the strangest sight to ever appear on that forgotten shore. An animal was swimming up river, nosing along the bank in a peculiar fashion, almost as if it were intelligently questing. When it reached the spot between two stones where Fors had knelt to drink before he climbed, it scrambled out of the water and sat up on its haunches, its forepaws held close to its lighter underbelly, its head high with sniffing nose testing the flowing air currents.

It was a rat-one of the huge, gray-coated ones of the old breed with which man has fought eternal warfare since the first days of time. A rat-Fors remembered back to the sunny morning in the ruins of the old city shops when just such a beast had sat to watch him without alarm. The rats flourished in the cities-everyone knew that. But for the most part men did not see them-even there. Their ways were underground, in the noisome burrows they had hollowed and claimed from cellar to cellar, through the old sewers and waterways.

The rat shook itself. Then the growing light brought a flash from its throat as it raised higher its head. A metal collar-surely that was a metal collar. But a collar on a rat-why-who-

Who lived in the cities? Who might tame and use rats? He knew the answer to that. But why? The rat alone was not a formidable fighter-not an ally as good as Lura- they were only to be feared in hordes. Hordes-!

The rat jumped to the top of a boulder and began to lick itself dry, as if it had successfully completed a set task and could now take time for its own concerns. Fors had not been mistaken by some trick of the light-as the beast’s head twisted and turned the collar was easy to see. It was made of flat links and seemed flexible.

Suddenly the creature stopped its toilet and crouched very still, its beady eyes aimed downstream. Fors could not move. He had to see what was going to happen. And the same idea flashed to his mind from Lura who was flattened out against the rock some feet away, her lips frozen in a snarl.

They heard the splashing first, a sound too regular to be natural. If he were wise he would leave now, but he could not.

An ungainly figure came skittering through the shallows around the waterworn rocks. Its shape was queer but Fors peered until he made out that the hunched back of the creature was in reality a basket cage. At its coming the collared rat showed its teeth wickedly but it did not attempt to escape.

The Beast Thing came on, leisurely reached out a long arm and picked up the rat by its collar while it snapped its teeth and clawed wildly. With the ease of long practice the rat master threw his captive through a trap door into the cage and snapped it shut again. From the wild chattering which ensued Fors deduced that more than one rat rode therein. But Lura was gliding away from her vantage point and he knew that she was right. It was time for them to go.

But as he fled he continued to wonder. Why the rats? Unless the Beast Things had rested and sent the rats to trail him during the night. If that was true his taking to the trees must have baffled them for a good while. Or did rats climb? He wished that he knew more about their habits. And why had none of the Star Men discovered during their brushes with the Beast Things this use of rats? Was it new-another manifestation of the urge which was bringing the sub-human forces out of their century old burrows to challenge the descendants of the Old Ones?

All the old tales about the Beast Things went through his head as he mechanically set a trail which would delay but not altogether throw off the pursuers. They were supposed to be the offspring of city dwellers caught in the full strength of the radiation waves, children so much mutant in form and mind that they were no longer human at all. That was one explanation.

But there was another story about them too. And that was that the Beast Things were the descendants of companies of the invading enemy, parties of soldiers both male and female who had been landed to occupy the country and then been forgotten when their own nation had disappeared under retaliatory atom bombing. Soldiers, bewildered and totally lost when no orders came, who clung stubbornly to the positions they had been sent to occupy-remaining there in spite of the radiation.

Whichever theory was the true one, the Beast Things, though they aroused revulsion and instinctive hatred among the humans, were also victims of the Old Ones’ tragic mistake, as shattered in their lives as the cities had been.

Fors jogged into the first section of the fire-swept land. Ahead lay a black and desolate waste. And there was little or no cover left. He would have to dare discovery from the rat-carrying Beast Thing and take to the riverside again.

The smell of burnt stuff was thick in the air, the stench making him cough as much as the powdery ashes which drifted up between his feet. Perhaps it was best to take to water. Here and there a fallen tree still showed a heart of glowing coals.

Coughing, rubbing his eyes to clear them, Fors scrambled over rocks and once even swam to breast the current. Here water marks were high above the present level of the stream. It was evident that the dam must have been at least partly repaired.

Then he clambered up over that structure itself. Before him lay the lake, ringed completely around with the black scar of fire. The beavers faced a famine season unless they moved. It would be a full year before the saplings would begin to sprout again and not for several generations would trees stand tall there once more.

Fors dove into the water. Even here the smell of smoke and the tang of burning clung. There were bodies floating too, a deer, a wild cow, and close to the far shore, a horse bearing on its puffed flank the painted sign of the Plains camp. He swam by it and headed up the feeder stream down which he and Arskane had won to freedom. But before he left the lake he glanced back.

And over the beaver dam was clambering the hunchbacked figure of the rat carrier. Behind it three others came up. As they hesitated on the dam, teetering as if they feared either the water or the still smoldering footing offered ashore, five more of their kind appeared.

Fors drew back into a half circle of rocks. Jarl’s plan had succeeded. He had no way of guessing how many of the Beast Things had ambushed the party at the beacon hill, but the pack now running at his heels had numbers enough to interest Cantrul. The Beast Things were dour and terrible fighters, and they were fighters who never wanted to head an open attack. Their present openness showed how much they held him in contempt. Fors watched, to see the rat cage unstrapped while its bearer went over into the lake.

A comrade tore away part of the dam’s substance to make a raft to carry the cage. Then they were all swimming, clumsily but surely, taking turns pushing the cage before them.

Fors took to his heels, skidding over slime-coated stones, the stream rising from thigh to waist as he panted through it and tried to dodge the smoking timber which had fallen across the banks here and there.

The patch of green grass he sighted where he had come to expect only the black of the burning was almost a shock. But there were reeds standing tall and unscorched in a thick mass. He plunged through them to shore. The mud bank beyond was thickly scored with hoofprints, some still fresh, good evidence that the Plainsmen were still there. Lura’s tracks overlay the others and the marks of her claws on the clay overhang were deep. Fors grabbed for the tough roots of a bush and pulled himself up.

He pulled himself up and took two steps. Then he tripped and rolled, his feet jerked out from under him. And as he went down he heard the shrilling of avicious laughter. His hand was tight on his sword hilt and he had the blade out almost before he had again sucked the air into his lungs. He came up, the bare blade inswing, ready and waiting.