The Torian Pearls

Chapter 10

Blade awoke to shouts and screams and furiously running feet. For a few seconds he vaguely wondered if the sounds came from Naula, perhaps reliving in her dreams their passion earlier that night. Then he snapped fully awake, remembering just in time not to spring to his feet and knock the tent down again. Gripping his shortsword, he crawled to the entrance of the tent and looked out.

Shadowy figures were passing in all directions at a dead run. Some of them stumbled and fell. He heard cries of anger and fear, screams of pain, the twang of bowstrings, and the mounting bellow of what seemed like all the drends in the camp. It seemed as if madness had suddenly attacked all of the Red People at once.

Then Blade saw a flicker of movement overhead, and looked up. Above him in the darkness glided one of the bat-winged creatures Blade had seen flying high above the shore, silhouetted against the sunset. Half invisible in the night, it was a shadowy nightmare. As it showed clearly in the firelight it looked even worse. It was neither bird nor bat, but something that combined the worst features of both, expanded to ten or twenty times the size of either.

The bat-bird glided past, out of the light and into the darkness. Then came the snap of great wings folding and a raw, tearing scream as the thing swooped down on a victim somewhere out in that darkness.

A long line of bat-birds swept past, too high to be counted accurately. Blade heard arrows whistling upward at the dim fleeting shapes and cursed. Fired wildly like that, the arrows would seldom hit or kill and usually fall back somewhere into the crowded camp.

Then two more bat-birds came flying low through the light of the fire. This time cooler-headed archers waited for them. Blade heard the sharp cracks of arrows driving into the leathery wings. One bounced from a scaled belly. The bat-birds flew on, ignoring the arrows as they would have ignored wads of cotton from a child's slingshot. They flew on into the darkness, and more screams rose where they stooped to the attack.

The bat-birds could seek and strike in total darkness, and what kind of defense could deal with them then? Blade couldn't be sure, but he did know that no one could do much against the bat-birds unless they themselves were out in the darkness where the creatures struck.

Blade snatched up his longsword, then suddenly realized that he would do well to take an even longer weapon. Naula stuck her head out of the tent. «Get back inside and stay down!» Blade shouted, reaching for the tent pole. He jerked it free with both hands and the tent slowly settled down on top of Naula. The bat-birds might be able to see in the dark like cats, but they could hardly see through the heavy leather.

Blade dodged around fear-paralyzed women and children huddled on the ground, and leaped over the body of a warrior sprawled on his back with a Kargoi arrow through his chest. He left behind the last glow of the fire, heard a low-pitched warbling cry above him, and turned to see a bat-bird beginning its stoop on him.

With only his swords Blade could not have met his attacker. They would have gone down into death together, steel and beak and talons all sinking in at the same moment.

Instead Blade held the tent pole, eight feet of limber wood, and he swung it like a champion cricketer. The darkness and the uproar and the nightmare creature hurling itself at him neither slowed nor weakened him. The pole caught the bat-bird across the side of its elongated head, and the thin skull cracked. The creature spun out of the air and thudded to the ground practically on top of Blade. He stepped back to let it fall, then jumped on it. Light bones cracked and crunched, the two ten-foot wings flapped wildly, then twitched into stillness. Blade sprang off the body and turned to meet the next attack.

Now the battle cries of warriors joined the uproar all around him. The Kargoi were beginning to fight back like the seasoned warriors they were. Another bat-bird swooped at Blade, then turned aside at the last moment as a dread thundered past. The beast ran blindly, bawling in panic and trampling down two women who stood in its path. On its back a bat-bird was perched, talons sunk deep in the flesh and booked beak burrowing even deeper. Blade himself had to step aside, then face the stoop of another enemy.

This time Blade had the time to strike with the precision of a surgeon and the deadliness of an executioner. Crack! and the pole struck the bat-bird in the throat, practically stopping it in midair. It fell. Crack! and the pole smashed down across the back of its neck. Crack! and the pole crushed its skull. It died without a cry or a twitch.

A third bat-bird singled Blade out for attack. This one came at him already slowed by two arrows that had found weak spots in its hide. Blade stood his ground and thrust with the end of his pole at the center of its chest. The beak snapped shut inches from his face and the talons reached out for his groin. The thrust had Blade's full strength behind it, meeting the full weight of the bat-bird. Ribs and internal organs caved in and another kill lay at Blade's feet.

After that Blade stopped keeping count. Every few moments a bat-bird came at him out of the darkness. He didn't know what it was about him or the ground where he stood that drew the attackers to him, but he was sure there was something.

Some of the bat-birds missed and flew off to seek prey elsewhere. All those who pressed home their attacks met Blade's lightning-quick pole, and all those who met the pole died. The bodies thrashed and twitched and poured out blood and death cries in a widening circle around him.

After a while Blade realized that some of the bat-birds were turning aside from him and the circle of dead around him. A little while longer, and he realized that the noise around him was dying away. Finally warriors of the Kargoi came picking their way through the darkness to stand and stare at Blade and his circle of dead. The attack of the bat-birds was over-for tonight.

As the warriors crowded toward him, Blade examined his pole. It was coated with blood and skin and scales. Under the slimy coating he could feel half a dozen cracks. A few more blows and it would have snapped off in his hands, leaving him no better off than the other warriors of the Kargoi.

As they crowded around him, the warriors pounded Blade's back and shoulders and poured out half-hysterical congratulations. They made so much noise he had no chance to ask what had happened elsewhere in the camp of the Red People, amid the darkness and the screams and the bellows.

It was dawn before anyone really knew what had happened in the camp. It was later than that before Paor was able to tell Blade.

The tale was ugly. At least two hundred of the Kargoi were dead or wounded. Among them was the son of Adroon, the High Baudz, who lay with his stomach slashed opened by talons, a wound that would surely kill him in a day or two. As many drends had been killed or so badly hurt that no one but the butchers could get much use out of them now.

To be sure, more than three hundred of the bat-birds also lay dead, at least forty of them Blade's own victims. But several times that many had attacked and flown away to safety.

Blade didn't like hearing any of this. He disliked almost as much hearing that Rehod had slain nearly twenty of the bat-birds, some of them with his bare hands. Now the loud-mouthed baudz had done something to make people forget his treachery in the duel with Blade.

The more Blade thought about what Paor had told him, the more he began to suspect that there'd been organization or even intelligence behind the attack of the bat-birds. Were the creatures themselves at least slightly intelligent? Blade found that hard to believe. The brains in the narrow skulls were far too small.

But if there was intelligence or direction, and it didn't come from the bat-birds themselves, then where did it come from?

Blade would much rather not have faced this question. But it wouldn't go away, and sooner or later answering it would become important. For now there simply wasn't enough information, and there were other things to do here that could save many lives. Blade made up his mind to watch the next attack much more closely, so that he would no longer have to rely on Kargoi observations of the bat-birds' behavior. It was just possible that everything he'd heard to suggest organization and intelligence was what untrained or frightened observers had imagined.

Blade sincerely hoped so.

Meanwhile, he was at work even as Paor talked to him. With his shortsword he systematically cut out the beaks and cut off the talons of the dead bat-birds. When he'd finished that he started cutting up the great leathery wings and started cutting out the tendons. Finally he took a fresh tent pole and tied one of the hooked, razor-sharp beaks to one end of it with several lashings of tendon. Paor watched all this in polite silence until Blade was finished.

«What do you make, Blade?»

Blade silently picked up his weapon and whirled it around his head. Then he swung it hard. The beak on the business end hissed angrily through the air. Paor carefully stepped out of range.

«I killed many bat-birds last night. I killed most of them with the pole of a tent. I would have killed more if I'd had something sharp on the end of that pole.»

«I see.»

If Paor didn't see now, he would do so before long. The Kargoi were proud of their skill in war. They were not so proud that they would refuse to learn from a hero who worked so quietly that it would be hard for them to realize that he was even teaching.

Blade said nothing for a while, as he practiced with his improvised weapon. Then Paor bent down and picked up one of the talons and one of the beaks.

«May I take these?»

«Certainly.» Blade laughed. «I suggest you tie them to something other than a tent pole, though. If the warriors of the Kargoi take all the tent poles to kill the bat-birds, all the tents will fall down on the women and children.»