The Unforsaken Hiero

II. A MAN ALONE

For a long time, there was no real waking period, but there were impressions—impressions which Hiero knew were real and not the stuff of nightmares.

Faces swam before his blurred vision. There was the face of Joseato peering down at him, while he lay strapped to a bench in some dim room in the rabbit warren of the palace vaults, a place half-glimpsed through pain and the agony of his aching head. The face was no longer that of the harassed functionary, but something older and colder, the eyes gleaming with mockery and triumph. Hiero realized that he had never really seen Joseato’s eyes before and cursed himself in some far corner of his mind. Out of the familiar face glared the gaze of the Unclean!

Hiero writhed frantically against the bonds which held him fast. The movement brought another face into view, and horror stilled his struggles. It was the face of Amibale Aeo, and from the young eyes came the same blaze of pure evil, with something else added to it; Amibale was quite mad, the madness mixed with the malign blasphemy which was the essence of the Unclean. Memory flickered across Hiero’s tormented mind. She was a witch, the dulled memory said, fighting the constant pain. She took him on trips to the jungle.

He felt a fresh stab in his arm and saw that Joseato held a glass tube capped with a bloody needle aloft.

“We can kill him later,” came a harsh whisper. “Not now. The chances are that the princess would know and act. They are sure in the North that he can talk to her mind. But if she feels no death, only silence, that gives us time. They say this kills the mind powers, but they warn us to be wary; he is strange and powerful. He must die, but away—far away. Distance lowers the mind touch. Even he cannot reach over long distances—not yet. He must stay drugged. Then he will be silent until he dies. Do you understand?”

“Oh, yes. Quite well.” The beardless face grimaced, and the ghastly eyes still shone from the young, unlined face. “I will get him away. Go back to the ball. I will follow shortly. Both of us should not be away. Leave this to me. One of my caravans leaves for the west at dawn and…”

Then the pain became too great to fight, and Hiero fainted.

During the following hours, he woke at random intervals, sometimes hot, sometimes chilled with unnatural cold. Tightly bound with dirty cloths, he lay in some strange thing that creaked, swayed, and stank. He wondered idly if he were on a ship, but it did not seem important. He tried weakly to use the mind touch, but nothing happened, and he knew without conscious consideration that he had lost it. Just as he had been robbed of his physical freedom, his mental strength had been despoiled. All sense of time and distance seemed lacking, too, and he had no idea of where or when this was. He dimly remembered being fed some vile broth. He dimly knew it was drugged, but he had no power to resist; he swallowed whatever they gave him, half in a coma. The strange, savage faces he glimpsed at times meant no more to him than any other elements of a seemingly endless nightmare. At times it seemed dark, at others light, but that did not seem important.

Then there was a sudden, hideous chorus of shrieks, followed by a wild discordance of meaningless cries, vibrations, and movements. The thing which carried him lurched violently, and a vast weight fell upon him. Some of his wrappings were torn in the convulsive motions of the weight. For seconds, pain shot through his legs. Instinctively, he kicked as hard as he could, some faint surge of adrenaline coming to his aid, and he found himself almost free of the weight. His eyes were covered, and he could see nothing. His hands were bound, but he could loose them…

Don’t loose them! Lie quiet, the inmost voice of his being warned. It is death to move.

He heard quick, almost furtive movements and the sounds of metal scraping and leather creaking. A voice muttered nearby and was answered by another farther off. There was a thudding as of beasts moving fast, then silence. Still he lay motionless, his tired mind intent only on making no sound. Presently, without knowing he had done so, he fell asleep.

When he awakened, he was hungry and thirsty, but not unreasonably so. His legs seemed free, though not his hands, and some cloth binding still covered his eyes. It was an easy matter to pull away the rag with which his eyes had been shrouded, even with bound hands. He gazed about, blinking in the light of the afternoon sun. He was lying in a hollow, under some low, scrubby bushes. Some large object pressed against his face, looming high over him and obscuring his vision. An already strong smell of decomposition informed him that it had been some animal. He was also tangled in a mesh of what seemed to be canvas and leather.

He lay quiet for a bit and listened. There was a light breeze playing through the bush above him, but the only other sound he could hear was a cackling, gabbling noise which came and went, sometimes rising to a squawk, then dying down again. He had no difficulty in identifying the voices of scavenger birds and he realized he must be lying in a place of death.

His mind was clearing rapidly now. He examined his hands. They were not bound with chains or leather thongs, as he had feared, but only with strips of cotton rag. Evidently his captors had feared no serious effort to escape.

It was no trouble to free himself. Then he pulled himself up over the dead beast whose body had sheltered him.

Five dead, gray kaws, the common beast of burden of D’alwah and the far South, lay about a small clearing. He was peering over the corpse of a sixth, and the broken-off shaft of an arrow an inch from his face was sufficient explanation of its death. Four absolutely naked men, their bodies in contorted attitudes, lay mingled with the dead cattle. Everything had been stripped from the dead, save for the battered harness of his own mount—for such he realized it must have been. He had been carried in some kind of crude canvas and leather litter on its broad back.

A flock of small, black vultures with oily, naked heads were tearing at the dead men. They looked up alertly as his head appeared, then took wing to settle in nearby bushes. Nothing else moved, and the only sound was the muted cackle of the scavengers.

Forcing his mind to throw off its dullness, he tried to reason out what must have happened.

The four men, and perhaps others, were taking him somewhere, walking alongside the kaws. They were ambushed, probably at dusk or even at night. His beast had died instantly, almost, but luckily had not fallen quite on top of him. The attackers’ hasty search had missed him, sheltered in the wreckage of his litter and almost covered by the kaw’s body. The ambushers had been in a hurry, probably afraid of discovery and pursuit, and they had decamped hastily after stripping the dead of everything they could find and use.

Hiero’s legs were as long unused as his head, but he staggered to the middle of the clearing. The croaking of the birds had grown louder, but they did not take wing as he surveyed the scene at closer range.

The dead men were unknown to him. He did not like what he saw of them, particularly since he was now sure they had been his late captors or guards. Even allowing for the agonies of death, they were unprepossessing, being small and of a sallow white color. Their long hair was also pale, and they were clean-shaven, with narrow eyes and protuberant jaws. They somehow did not appear to be creatures of daylight. He wondered who they were and where they had been taking him.

Staring at the landscape of thorn scrub about him in the waning afternoon sun, he forced his dormant training to come back to him, despite his spinning head. Slowly at first, he began to search for anything which might be useful. No weapons lay about, though he was sure there had been plenty of them when the attack came. Indeed, nothing lay about except the corpses. Aside from missing him, the attackers had done a most complete job of plunder. Even the arrows had been retrieved, save for the stub buried in his kaw. There was nothing he could use and no clue to either his captors or those who had slain them.

Other than worn leather shorts and sandals in which he found himself dressed, he had absolutely nothing.

He was just beginning to examine the tracks which littered the clearing, finding only the rough marks of booted feet and some hoof prints of kaws, when the carrion birds fell silent, then lifted from the bushes. From, a remote distance to the east, there came the faint note of a questing horn.

Hiero stood frozen. The birds had flown off low over the thorny scrub, not high in a flock, for which he was grateful. He did not know who had sounded that horn, but as far as he was concerned, this empty waste held nothing but foes. And they might have marked the birds rising.

Again the horn sounded, a solitary call. This time it was answered from the south and the north, though both calls were far off and still well to the east of his position. There had been at least four horns, he estimated, well spaced, signaling position and future movement. Someone had been driving in a long line, looking for something. For what, if not for him?

Hardly thinking, his reflexes taking over, aided by years of training, the Metz stooped and seized a dead branch of thorn bush that was covered with small leaves. Quickly he erased all traces of his presence from the dry earth. Then he began to run slowly to the west, keeping to gravel where he could; when that was not possible, he brushed the ground gently to blot his tracks.

He ran for what he estimated was half an hour, maintaining constant awareness of where he trod. Behind him, the horns still called. The distance seemed the same as when he had first heard them, indicating that the pursuit was moving at roughly the same speed as he was.

The sun was now sinking fast ahead of him, and it showed him that the scrub was thinning out. There were more patches of sand and pebble underfoot now, and both the bush and the sparse, wiry grass had almost disappeared. The color of the earth itself had changed from a sandy brown to a bluish gray.

Later, the sound of the horns changed. At least two of them pealed out in short, summoning notes. Hiero knew they had come upon the dead and were signaling a rally. He trudged grimly on. It was agonizing to think that they might be friends, perhaps sent by Luchare to rescue him, but the chances were too small; he had no idea where he was or how far he had come since being kidnapped, but it must be a long way. If he were right, the blueness of the ground and the increasing absence of vegetation meant that he was heading into fresh and unknown dangers. He had seen this thinning scrub far to the north and knew that it portended the approach of a desert. In the latitude of D’alwah, there was only one kind of desert marked on the map—one of the Deserts of The Death.

Soon he knew he was right. The last bushes died away; there before him, glittering with fragments of mica and blue, siliceous sands, stretched the desert, unbroken to the western horizon. Behind him, the horns sounded again with their original, questing notes.

Hiero had no choice of action. Waterless, foodless, and without weapons, he set out into the waste, determined that he would not be taken again. Anything was better than his late captivity.

As night came on, the horns fell silent. But he plodded on and on, his face fixed toward the west. By now, his pace was slow and uneven, and he stumbled at intervals. Once he fell to his knees. Rising took most of his energy.

He limped across a shallow basin and reached a patch of naked rock, where the going was easier than on the soft sand. Here he rested, his breath coming in short gasps. He worked a small pebble over his dry tongue; it was better than nothing, but he needed water badly. His disciplined body could go without food, but he must have water.

He raised his head and surveyed the arid landscape that was revealed by the light of the half-moon. Broad patches of sand stretched south as far as his gaze could reach. To the east, the sands ran to the distant horizon; and the north held more sand, mingled with patches of pebbles and broken rock. But to the west, black spires showed against the stars—perhaps pinnacles of a range or buttresses of a line of low, jagged cliffs.

With a supreme effort, he rose to his feet. If there were any place of safety, those western peaks might hold it. There could be caves or at least crannies in which he could shelter through the heat of the coming day. There might even be sources of water and food, if he were clever enough to find them.

As he braced himself to continue, there came a faint, distant sound out of the south. Hiero listened intently, trying for the hundredth time to focus the powers of his mind for mental search, as he had painstakingly taught himself in the last year. His whole frame tensed with an almost physical effort as he tried to probe the night. At last, he subsided with a silent curse. Whatever had been done to him must have been permanent. He was blind in the use of his mental powers. Somehow, his talents had been stolen from him by drugs, and now he was helpless, without either physical or mental weapons on this plain. He cursed himself again, then rebuked himself. He made the sign of the cross on his naked breast and murmured a brief prayer of remorse. He had forgotten he was a priest and that a priest thanked God for his blessings—such as being alive at all!

He set out for the distant hills at a slow, steady trot, trying to ignore his fatigue and the ever-increasing thirst. As he went, he listened intently. No sound broke the silence, save the shuffle and scrape of his sandals, but he was not to be misled. His ability to probe for the minds of other beings might be gone; but, dormant in his brain, some of the synapses that had guarded him for so long still stirred and flickered, if in a dim and half-useless way. There was evil in the night! He knew it as if it were written in letters of fire on the sands. Someone or something hunted, and, since he had no defenses of any kind, he must find shelter or die in the attempt. He forced himself to plod on, concentrating on simply placing one foot in front of the other. He had no illusions about his present predicament. He was in a place of hideous danger, one from which few of the rare travelers who ventured had ever returned, one of the Deserts of The Death.

Thousands of years in the past, the hell fires of the atom had totally blighted many places. The worst of these still shone with the bale glow of radiation and were utterly lethal. Yet this was not one of those. Like all the Metz of the far North, Hiero had an inbred sensitivity, as well as some tolerance to radiation. He could sense that this was one of the barren patches from which most, if not all, of the killing gamma rays had long since evaporated. That did not mean his peril was less; perhaps it was only longer delayed.

For though no blue witch fires danced upon the sand and broken scree around him, still the area seemed lifeless and waterless. No plants grew, not even lichens, at least not in the stretch he had traversed since the previous dawn. Yet the fading radiation had left its mark in other ways. Strange life had come to be, bred from horrid mutation; all over the world, and in these deserts it was deemed strangest of all. The landscape might appear empty in the wan light but there was life, of a sort. Despite the loss of his mind-search abilities, he could feel it. There was a growing menace which throbbed in his already aching skull. Doggedly, he trudged on, his gaze fixed on the dark towers of rock which rose out of the west to meet him.

Again he paused to catch his breath, but this time went only to one knee, fearful that he would not be able to rise if he squatted. And once more out of the south came the sound. This time it was clearer, a strange, high, wavering noise, as if somehow in the night a monstrous sheep blethered on an impossibly high note. Priest and Killman, soldier and ranger that he was, Hiero felt a finger of ice trace the length of his spine. Whatever made that noise was not something he wanted to meet. Again he crossed himself and then rose and set off once more into the west. He was numb with exhaustion, but he continued on. The cry was surely that of a hunter, and it must be a hunter on his trail. How it had been summoned, whence it had come to place itself on his track, he could not guess. But he knew that it was.

Despite his condition, he kept moving steadily along. When he next looked up, he saw that the hills had risen before him and that slopes and ridges of rock were already rising to the left and right from the drifted sand and erg which had been his companions for so many weary hours. He caught a distant glimpse of a spiky thing jutting from a crevice off to his left and recognized it as some sort of plant, though of a strange and unpleasant kind. Perhaps he could find water after all, if he persisted. On and yet on he went, the last moisture in his body coating him in a crackled film of grit and perspiration.

Behind him, the evil cry quavered out under the sky once more, far louder than when last heard, alien and rife with menace, trailing off into that impossibly high note which almost physically hurt the inner fibers of his being. He did not stop this time, but drew on his last stores of energy to lope over the rising ground to his front.

Had the night been dark, he might have been totally helpless, forced to move at a crawl. But the half-moon showed him that a small canyon sloped up into the higher rock ahead of him, black and menacing, yet a haven of refuge to him. If he could only hold out long enough to get into the hills!

He reached the mouth of the ravine and lurched into it, straining at every muscle. The moonlight entered only in patches, but he could see sufficiently for his needs. The floor under his sandals was shale, worn and slippery, but he managed to keep his feet while he sought on either side for the shadow of a cave or other place of refuge. There was no further sound behind him, but he was not deceived. Whatever followed was close upon him. If he found no hiding place in the next few minutes, he was doomed.

For a second a face filled his mind, the face of a lovely woman, dark and mysterious, with masses of tight curls, soft, full lips, and dark, lustrous eyes. Luchare! Was he to perish alone and lost, never to see her smile again? Frantically, clumsily, he clambered up the narrowing gully, his soldier’s gaze never ceasing to search for some place that would at least give him a fighting chance to live. Yet no cranny broke the smooth rock walls, which had now closed in until they were no more than the length of his body away on either hand. In desperation, he looked up and then saw it.

Ahead some small distance, the winding passage bent both upward and to his left. As it did so, a narrow buttress towered up from the southern wall, like a rough and broken turret, narrowing at the top to a tiny platform. But the side of the pinnacle, as it abutted the gorge, was cracked and broken! To a skilled climber, it presented an ascent of no great difficulty. Weary though he was, Hiero felt a thrill of energy course through his veins. In a second he had reached the base of the craglet and had begun his climb, placing his hands and feet swiftly and surely as he swarmed upward.

The spike of crumbling stone was not high, perhaps a little more than five times his own height, and he was soon at the top. With a gasp of effort, he pulled himself up and over the rim and flopped down on the more or less level ledge which crowned it.

But he dared not rest for a second. He did not know what followed, nor its powers, and he knew it was coming hard upon his track. To something which could climb, his new shelter might become a trap of a most terrible kind. His eyes swept the narrow top of the crumbling monolith, and a fierce gleam lit them. At arms’ length there lay several massive chunks of broken stone, the products of weather and erosion in the distant past. As quietly as he could, he gathered two of the larger ones close to his chest, trying not to grunt with the effort of his fading strength. Then he sought to relax, while he peered back down the black ravine, watching as steadily as possible for the pursuer he knew to be coming, willing his body to snatch even a few seconds of rest for the ordeal to follow.

And then he heard it. At first it was simply a muffled noise in the silent night, the sound of a heavy movement, then another and another. He was listening to the soft tread of some massive body advancing up the same path he had followed only moments before, a body trying to move as quietly as possible in the hope of coming upon its prey unawares. His eyes narrowed in pure rage. At least he was not taken by surprise. The hunter would learn that a Metz Kiliman was not to be chivied across the sand like a hunted deer. After days of helplessness, here was something at which he could strike!

Closer and closer came the sounds. Once he heard a faint rattle on the shale, as if a monstrous claw had touched upon a fragment of loose rock. Now he could detect the sounds of breathing, deep and hoarse. And then around a corner below, it came.

Veteran though he was of strange combats, hardened to the monstrous life forms spawned by The Death, Hiero nevertheless drew a deep gulp of air as he stared down at what had been drawn out of the southern wastes to seek his blood.

In the flickering and uncertain moonlight, there appeared a shifting bulk of a strange blue tint, as if the blue poison fires of the great desert had left their awful legacy in the color of this, their spawn. The great tailless trunk, the size of along-extinct horse, was carried on four massive legs, ending in mighty three-curved hooves which were more like vast talons. The long neck, mottled with the bluish glaze, ended in a head also not unlike that of a horse, but hideous tusks protruded from the blubber lips. And from the great, earless head there rose twin spires of bone, each pointed with a needle spike.

But the most dreadful feature, one which set the monster apart from all normal life, was its eyes. Hollow orbs of lambent flame, they were pupilless and ablaze with cold light. And the man, frozen on his ledge, knew at what he looked.

This was the Death Hart, of which he had read in the ancient records of D’alwah. Far in the remote past, these monsters had been common and had preyed on the scattered humans of the South in packs, emerging from their desert lairs to slaughter and pull down any living meat they could find, ravaging the lands which bordered the desert until the few scattered tribes that lived there had fled in anguish and despair. Not for many lives now had the creatures been seen, and they had become only a matter of awful legend, at least in the minds of men.

As he looked at the slavering jaws, Hiero knew that whatever creature had given rise to this abomination in the lost ages, it was now no eater of grass! Of a size scarcely less than Klootz, this thing was yet a carnivore, designed to rend and tear living flesh, to shatter bone and sinew to feed its incredible maw.

As he stared, his mind racing at the embodied sight of the horrific past come to life before him, it looked up and saw him. Once more, that horrid, yammering call rang through the clear night air, this time in a volume of sheer noise that left the senses numb as it resounded and echoed off the rock walls. Hiero closed his eyes for a second as the vibrations of that frightful call pierced through his body to the very marrow of his bones.

As the echoes of that ghastly cry died into silence, he opened his eyes, just in time to see the demon of the desert hurl itself upward at him, the hideous mouth open to expose both the rows of fangs and the massive tusks set at the corners of the colossal gape. Then it sprang.

Braced though he was for the attack, the Metz priest was still taken by surprise. The enormous haunches had a strength he would not have believed, and the leap carried the great body almost to his own level in one incredible bound. For an awful instant, he stared into the oily light of the brute’s eyes from no more than a sword’s length away, while its filthy breath spume poured over him in a wave of hot loathsomeness. Then it was gone and he heard a colossal thud as it fell back to the base of the rock.

His heart pounding, Hiero peered over the lip of the monolith, hoping against hope that the atrocity had done itself some injury in that mighty fall, only to see it crouched below, unharmed and glaring upward with the same avid lust. Not by any short slip or fall could that strange body be injured. Hiero remembered that the ancient scrolls had emphasized the invulnerability of the beasts, claiming they could tear down the heavy timbers of village walls like so many jackstraws. This thing would never fail through any efforts of its own. If he were to survive, he must carry the battle to the enemy, hopeless though that might appear.

As he watched, the monster reared up again, but this time slowly, until the great hoof-claws of the forelimbs were stretched to their fullest limits. As the three great talons of each leg clamped into the rock of the cliff, they bit in, the wirelike sinews contracting, crunching in at almost beyond a believable rate. As Hiero stared, aghast, the rock up which he had clambered ground and crumbled. Below, he could hear the terrible rear limbs crush the eroded stone in the same way. The hideous eyes stared up at him, unwinking. Even as he recoiled, the mighty hindquarters drew up. Before his unbelieving stare, the abortion out of vanished memory was actually clinging and grinding its way into the rock. It was a feat almost beyond belief, even after his sight of its capabilities in that initial leap. Next, he knew, the great forearms would extend once more, and this time they would be over the ledge of his shelter! And a remote, still corner of his mind said that would be all!

The dreadful orbs froze his blood as he crouched on the summit. As in a dream, he saw the talons of the right forepaw begin to extend upward for the last time.

He rose to his feet in one lithe, flowing movement and, high above his head, he balanced the bigger of the two chunks of scree which he had hoarded against such a moment. It was a great, jagged thing, barely within his powers to lift.

The monster gaped, the vast, fang-lined jaws open, as it once more drew breath for that appalling sound. The rock came down with all the strength in Hiero’s tired body. Between the foam-flecked lips, past the cruel ranks of fang and tusk, it tore with the weight and speed of an avalanche, deep into the yawning gullet, a projectile of both murderous force and certainty. There was a sound as if some incredible axe had bitten into a vast, half-rotted log. A horrid, choked scream welled up, bubbling through ripped tissue and foul blood. Again came the thump of a tremendous fall, and then a flopping, scrabbling noise, punctuated by the thrashing and beating of giant limbs. Then there was silence, and the exhausted man felt a faint breeze stir his hair and the beat of life in his veins.

Slowly and painfully, Hiero inched his way forward once more and looked down at the base of the crag. His gaze was swimming and he knew he could not hold on to consciousness much longer, but one glance was sufficient.

The great bulk which lay below, limp and awful, could certainly never move again. The long neck writhed outward in the last agony, and a black stream of its life’s blood trickled and dripped over the ravine’s floor from the shattered skull, down into darkness. Hiero’s crude weapon had driven deep into the malformed head and had torn into the brain and the seat of the central nervous system. Unused to any opposition from its prey, the beast had succumbed to desperation, courage, and plain gravity.

The man tried to mouth a prayer, but got no further than the word “God.” Then he sank back into a drugged exhaustion. It was not true sleep, but the reaction of a totally overstrained mind and body, a sort of trance in which he knew himself to be alive, but was unable to do more than simply breathe. His eyes shut and his body slowly curled into a fetal position, while his brain reeled and spun through emptiness and nullity. Eventually he really slept, his soul adrift in the cosmos.

He awoke suddenly, all senses alert. His body felt as if it were aflame, and his tongue felt like a dry stick as he tried to run it over his cracked and broken lips.

Glancing up, he saw the fiery sun at zenith and knew that he had slept for many long hours. No more than half the night had gone before his encounter with the unholy Death Hart, and now it was once again noon. He felt faint and still utterly weary, but he forced himself to think, though even thought called for an almost physical effort. Water! Water and some cover. He could not survive another day in the appalling heat of this empty waste without liquid and shelter. He had to start at once while some faint energy remained in his flagging muscles, while he could still reason, and even search for help.

A quick look and the simultaneous realization of a noisome stench showed him the bloated carcass of his late enemy sprawled at the base of his refuge; rot had set in with blinding speed. Around the huge corpse, he caught small, flickering movements. Light glinted off lithe bodies as a horde of some scavenging vermin tore and burrowed into the foul meat of that huge decay. Focusing as well as he could and squinting in the desert glare, he could make out pointed heads, glittering green scales, and short legs, as well as the red glitter of many beady eyes. The things seemed to be some vile combination of rat and lizard, well suited to their home and as alien as the dead monster to the rest of life.

Looking about, the Metz selected yet another loose fragment of the rock on which he lay, this one a narrow splinter as long as his forearm, not unlike a crude stalactite. It was not much of a weapon, but it might be enough, should the things below be more than scavengers. In any case, he reminded himself grimly, he had no choice. He had to leave now.

He tucked the crude stone knife in his waist, where a thong supported his ragged leather shorts, and began to climb cautiously down. As he went, he watched the creatures carefully, alert for any signs that they might attack.

He was more than halfway down when they saw him, and then all movement ceased. At least a score of sharp muzzles pointed up, and the red eyes stared unblinkingly, the shimmering bodies frozen, as they watched him descend. Short-legged and no bigger than house cats, there was nevertheless enough of them to menace an exhausted and almost weaponless man. He stared at them for a moment, wondering if the needle claws and fangs he could now see could be poisoned. It would fit with everything else he had seen in this sun-blistered hell. It made no difference. There was still no choice but to go down. He did so, slowly and steadily, one hand ready to snatch the weapon from his side, should it be needed.

For one instant, as his foot touched the rock floor of the gully, he seemed to feel a wave of hate in his mind. Then, like an explosion of greenish light, the creatures were gone, and the stinking, torn bulk of the dead beast was the only other tenant of the place. Hiero leaned against the wall of the spire, limp with reaction. Apparently the things found him as alien as he them, and they had doubts enough about his powers not to challenge them.

Choking in the foetor billowing from the pile of carrion beside him, he set off up the canyon, moving at a walk, which was all he could manage. It was a relief to round the base of the rock at last and move up into cleaner air, but such relief was only momentary. He could die from the terrible sunfire as easily as from the fangs of any beast. The lizard-rats might have the last word in the end.

An hour later, he was again almost at the limit of his strength. He had reached the top of the ravine and found himself on the rim of a low plateau. The top of this mesa ran only a short distance to the north, but its broken, eroded surface stretched as far south as he could see, a brooding emptiness of umber and ebon minerals.

Short and weather-worn peaks rose here and there, and now and again shadows betrayed the presence of pits and cratered openings, as well as those of more jagged coulees and ravines, like that from which he had just emerged. The air was still under the blue vault above, and the heat of the sun burned down like a furnace on the grim and empty wastes.

He looked to the west and saw that the plateau, the worn surface of some ancient range of hills, extended for perhaps a kilometer in front of him. Raising his gaze, he noted that even more naked desert swept from the western edge almost to the horizon, but at the very limit of his sight, there to the southwest, was another faint, dark line. Could this be the end of the barrens and the recommencement of the great southern forest? He sighed. It made little difference, really. He would be helpless in a few hours if he could not find water and shelter.

Hiero looked hard at the foreground and presently noted something which caused his spirits to rise. Some distance off to his right front, there ran a low ridge which made him stare in speculation. It was hazy, wavering to a man’s height above the heated stones. There was no breeze, so it could not be either blown sand or dust. If his tired eyes were not playing him false, somewhere over there was moisture!

He set off again at the same patient walk, husbanding the last of his strength. He did not allow himself to hope too much. If moisture it were, it could well be some foul pool of reeking poisons, metallic compounds, and mineral salts, of a type whose very vapor could slay him. That such things were common enough in desert regions he knew from his studies, both in D’alwah and, farther back in time, in the northern Abbeys.

There was, of course, no option save to continue, and this he did. Soon he found himself at the base of the ridge over which the strange thickening of the atmosphere had appeared. The slope was neither very high nor difficult, but he moved with great care. His bones felt so brittle and weak that it was hard to believe that they could support him at all, while the thirst in his body was held off from stark madness only by a last effort of will.

Slowly, he drew himself to the top of the ridge and peered over. A faint thrill of hope came to him as he watched, but he still held his weak body under rigid control.

Below lay a large, rounded pit, or crater, with walls which had once been steep, but which were now gashed and scarred with falls of rubble and seamed with numerous cracks and crevices. The floor of the pit was smooth and sand-covered in places, in others broken and tumbled. Here and there around the edges of the place were the irregular mouths of caves and the shadows of overhangs. And there was life.

Growing in patches and sometimes even dense clumps about the bottom were living plants. They resembled nothing Hiero had ever seen or heard of before, but they seemed to come in several types. There was a maroon and purple thing, like a vast barrel, with long, pendulous fronds drooping from its top and trailing about on the ground below. Another type looked somewhat like a huge starfish, set atop a fleshy, brown stalk. This type grew in clumps, as if distorted and ragged umbrellas were somehow grouped in bunches. Smaller growths, as if of some bristling, spiked grasses of yellowish green, waist-high, sprang from patches of sand. Nowhere was there a hint of movement. Nor was there a sign of water. Save for the strange plants, the natural arena appeared as arid as the rock to which he clung.

But it was there! His trained body, sensitive to many influences unknown by his ancestors, could feel it. His whole system knew there was water somewhere down below. That it was out of sight meant nothing. It was there and it was close, drinkable, lifesaving water!

Once more he swept the pit with his eyes. Worn though he was, the savage training of the Abbey schools still governed him. If there was water here, and he knew there was, and if there was life, even so strange as these plants, then there was danger. In an oasis, near water holes, there lurked the hunters. He glared over the crater floor again, step by step, trying his best to see into the shadows, past the cave openings, and under the ledges. Nothing moved; the place might have been some strange sculpture, the dream of an unknown artist.

He could wait no longer. He moved over a bit to his right, where one of the broken slides of shale reached almost to the rim, and started slowly down it, never taking his vision from the silent pit. As he drew closer to the bottom, he searched even harder for some sign of life other than the enigmatic plants. Surely there must be insects, even in a place as bizarre as this? Yes, there was something! just below him rose a low mound, knee-high, with many small openings into and from which tiny things came and went on incomprehensible errands. The anthill gave him a sense of comfort, the first familiar sight from his own world he had seen since his escape. He watched, entranced, as a column of the little things marched by a few meters distant. He noticed that they seemed to have paths which avoided any of the vegetation by a wide margin, but his wits were now so dazed with tiredness that he simply recorded the fact without drawing any conclusions from it.

Then he drew some conclusions with great rapidity. The edge of the column overran an invisible barrier near one of the solitary purple barrels. The reaction was rapid. The nearest of the trailing fronds whipped up and down like a flail. The intrusive edge of the column was gone. The frond folded itself over, and Hiero saw that an opening had appeared in the top of the barrel plant. The opening sucked, as a child licks its fingers. Then the frond, now cleansed, drooped and once more lay idle and seemingly harmless on the white sand.

Hiero stared hard at the barrel. This one was small, not up to his knee; but farther out in the pit, there were some which towered over his head and were as thick around as an Abbey tun of wine. Once again he turned his gaze on the ants that continued on their business, apparently undisturbed. But he saw now that they avoided all the plants, no matter of what variety, not simply the purple barrels. No doubt they had reason.

He put one foot on the floor of the strange pit, then another. No plants were close. He turned around and then surveyed the place from the ground level. Down here, the heat was not so strong, the air ever so slightly damp. Where is that damned water?

Even the mild blasphemy was enough to make him correct himself. He fell naturally into a kneeling position, arms outthrust, and let the spirit move him as it had in the past. His splayed arms pointed vaguely to the northeast. Rising slowly and carefully, he set out in that direction, carefully steering clear of any plants along the way.

Hiero limped and tottered on, some inner guide keeping him away from the vegetation. He had now reached the point of no return in terms of response, and his subconscious alone saw the quaver of the various things he came near. If a barrel plant shook as he approached or a clump of the spike grass wavered and leaned toward him, he saw it not. Along a mystic line of safety, he weaved between one danger and another, fell sidewise in one place, lurched back in another, but always kept to one direction.

In a moderately short time, he found himself under one of the overhanging cliffs he had noted from the rim. The heat, to a stranger, would have still been terrific. To him, fresh from the glow of the desert sun, it was like stepping out of a furnace into an ice palace. One moment he was in a place of raging heat; the next, he was shaded and cool. The light was dimmed and he found it hard to see. Above him, a great shelf of rock cut off the sunlight and most of the heat. He strove to peer ahead through the dimness and found himself on the edge of a still pool of clear water.

It reached as far as he could see to the left and right and back into the shadows before him. The smooth rock under his sandaled feet felt pleasantly cool. Without further ado, he collapsed on his face, falling with a splash across the margin of the pool.

Some vestige of the training he had spent his life receiving saved him from death. He took one gulp of the water, then turned on his back and allowed the coolness to soak into his skin. A man or woman of less iron will would have died on the spot, drinking to repletion. His background saved him. Something told him, even in extremity, that he was close to death, and he restrained his water-starved body. After a long while, he took another drink, less in size than the first, and after a longer period, another, this one less still. All the while he lay on the rock shelf, barely afloat.

The water tasted slightly acid, but was cool and pure. His body, trained in the detection and rejection of poisons, would have told him, had there been something wrong, even in the last extremity. It was simply water, filtered through strange rock perhaps, but nothing more. The delight of feeling it come through, or appearing to come through, his very skin held him in thrall. He floated in a sea of appreciation, reveling in the idea of wetness.

Eventually, after about the eighth cautious drink, sanity began to return. He suddenly saw the damp roof of the shelf above him and, with a great surge of emotion, realized that he was alive once more and that further plans could be made. Also, he felt a new want, one he had not permitted for a long time. He was hungry.

He took another drink, still measured. He did not want to become waterlogged.

He shot a glance at the roof of the stone above his head and another down at the pool on whose brink he had been lying. This must be a catchment basin, where the rare rains were collected and saved by nature, and where the whole ecosystem combined to create the oasis of the strange little pocket in which he found himself. Or into which he had stumbled. Or, said a side corner of his mind, into which he had been led. He examined this latter idea as calmly as he could and dismissed it. With the loss of his mental abilities, there had come a concomitant reliance on those of the body. He did not believe he could be led anywhere.

Eventually, he had absorbed all the water he could take and began to feel the first traces of a chill. This was enough warning, and he got out of the pool at once. Sitting on the bank—or rather, slope, for it was a very gentle gradient—he stared out at the rock-rimmed little valley which made up the pocket. Evening was coming, and he realized bemusedly that he had been lying in the shallows for most of the afternoon. The warmth of the sun was still strong, however, and he no longer felt any chill, despite the lengthening shadows.

As the dark of evening grew upon the landscape, he watched the strange plants of the crater; and now, refreshed and with his faculties alert, he saw other things. There was a delicate movement among the bushes, almost as if a breath of wind were moving them in the utterly windless air, and he watched them as they put themselves to sleep. The barrel plants tucked their long fronds tightly about themselves like ladies’ cloaks, and the spike grasses withdrew into the ground, leaving only horny sheaths of dull brown on the surface, less than one-third of the original length. The starfish plants somehow withdrew into their own stalks, until nothing was left except a thing like a fat stump, devoid of adornment. The whole appearance of the little pocket changed, becoming even more still and silent.

As the long shadows crept across the basin floor before him, he continued watching, utterly motionless, but now from his belt he drew the narrow fragment of rock, hoarded since his descent from the crag far down the outer slope. His ears strained as the swift night of the desert fell like a mantle upon the crater. Soon he heard what he had been hoping to hear.

There were squeaks and scratching noises in the night. Hiero’s eyes, trained to the dark, saw small shadows darting here and there across the sands. Close to the rock on which he crouched stood the cone-stump into which a starfish plant had withdrawn. Now something the size of a small dog, with stumpy legs and a dragging tail, waddled around the base of the plant and sat up on its rump. It began to gnaw the plant-thing, its teeth making a grinding noise. Hiero surmised that it would never have dared to do so in the light of day. At night, the metabolism of the plants forced them to withdraw in nocturnal hibernation. Then they could be made into victims.

The animal was hardly more than arm’s length away and the priest struck like lightning. There was a crunch as the broad skull cracked, and the body fell before him, barely twitching. Holding it close, he gave it a careful examination. Despite the dim light, for the moon had not yet risen, he could see enough for his purpose.

The creature was not all that ill-looking, actually, though not much like anything he had seen before. In some ways, its pale-furred body rather resembled that of a squat rodent, and it had similar chisel teeth. Its round tail appeared overlong for its body, and he wondered if it might not be prehensile. There were no external ears, and its eyes were small and buried deep in the head.

It seemed clearly mammalian, and the blood which stained its fur smelled no more alien than his own. In short, it was food.

What followed would no doubt appall a person used to life under conditions of civilization. Hiero could either take or leave civilized habits; he had been raised on a frontier of strife and savage warfare, under conditions so bitter that only the toughest survived. When you were hungry, in his lexicon, you ate. What you ate and how depended on what was around. If you had no fire, you ate raw meat.

He got enough of the fur off with his stone pick to sink his strong teeth through the tough hide. It was not easy chewing, but he had eaten worse and no doubt would again, he thought to himself. After a dozen rending bites, he stopped long enough to say a rude grace, then went back to hacking and chewing once more. The stringy meat, rank and strong, went down with no particular difficulty. Any alien element, anything like a poison, would have caused him to regurgitate as soon as his body had detected it. There was nothing, though, and after a while his body felt replete. He wrapped the remnant of the carcass in the scraps of hide he had ripped off and looked about for shelter. He had drunk and he had eaten. Now his overtaxed frame needed rest more than anything else.

His eyes swept the sands and the hillocks of dormant vegetation which dotted the moonlit arena, becoming fixed on one spot off to the right. Several round holes, black circles in the paler rock of the wall, showed in the wan light. Small things still moved and rustled out on the floor of the pit. His killing of the hapless plant eater had passed unnoticed. No doubt other predators existed and fed at night also. He would have to be careful of them, as well. He rose quietly, holding the meat in one hand, his crude weapon poised in the other, and moved off toward the openings he had marked down. In forty meters, the water of the pool came to an end; at the same time, the roof of the vault which shielded it tapered back into the inner slope. He passed quietly out under the stars and the half circle of the risen moon. Still the small night sounds continued without a break around him. The oasis pursued the doubtless ancient tenor of its circumscribed life, unconscious that a new killer had come, one far more dangerous than any ever before encountered.

The killer himself felt weary, but also, despite his fatigue, he had a strange sense of peace. For the first time in days—was it only days?—he had lost the feeling of being hunted, of being the helpless prey of powers and enemies with whom he could not contend. Alone he had fought and conquered the demon of the dark; alone he had found water, food, and shelter. Alone he had survived. His God had not turned away His face, and Hiero was grateful and humble. But deep inside, he felt a thrill of pride. The Abbey training could not make a man, but it could find one; and having done so, it could teach him to help himself. That was what God wanted, as did the Church Universal—for men and women to help themselves, to struggle to the end, never to give up. It was a simple lesson and, like so many simple lessons, not really easy to learn.

He paused by the first of the openings and took a careful look at it. Too shallow, no more than a niche in the stone face. The next was barely a scrape, the third too narrow. The fourth opening, however, was something more useful. An entrance barely large enough to permit passage gave onto a rounded chamber, in which he could crouch or lie down, but was no larger than he needed. Further, a pile of rubble partially filled one end—dead sticks and small stones, with some ancient bone fragments. The place had doubtless been the lair of some creature before, but the former owner was long gone, and not even an odor remained. Hiero hastened to block the entrance with as much of the litter as he could sweep up, and soon only a small opening admitted the night air. The floor of the little cave was sand, and he saved some of the softer twigs and bark fragments, as they appeared to be, for a pillow. He dug holes for his hips and shoulders and curled up to get some badly needed rest. If some creature should menace him, he felt his senses were alert enough now to give him the instant’s warning which could mean the difference between life and death. He could do no more.

Though his body relaxed and his sinews loosened for the first time in many hours, sleep did not come. He did not try to force it. Any rest, even with open eyes, was still priceless. If his body was exhausted, his mind and his nervous system apparently were not. So be it. If his mind was awake, he could make use of it. He could afford to neglect no assets at this juncture. He would try once again to regain the skills he had somehow lost in the nightmare of the past few days and nights.

He willed his mind to sweep outward, gently at first, trying to build the once mighty powers he had possessed so short a time before. He was very, very cautious now, trying only to shut his ears to the small life forms which scurried about the basin and, instead, to sense them with his brain, to catch their tiny auras the impulses that distinguished them from not-life, the minute sparks of individuality which made them different each from another.

Supposing he should be able to recapture his vanished ability, or even part of it? Would he also recapture the web of hard-taught defenses? If his unguided thought roamed the night, perhaps partially in use, haltingly effective, could it not lead other minds, other powers, to his present location? And should the Unclean find him once more, the most hated of their foes, how could he protect himself? He had no answer. Yet it must be attempted. He had, once again, no choice.

Eventually, he stopped. The blockage was still intact. He could hear and see, smell and taste, but the years of Abbey training, the genetic ability of the telepath with which he had been endowed at birth, all were gone. So too were the far, far greater powers he had learned on his own during the last year, the strengths which had enabled him to defy and even overthrow certain of the great adepts of the enemy, Masters of the Circles of the Unclean. He could not repress a moan, choking it back in his throat even as it came. Unfair! It was unfair that a man should be reft so, unfair that he could be torn asunder from his greatest weapons, trapped without the force which alone might enable him to go to war! Unfair! Curse the Unclean and their foul science!

With an almost physical effort, he beat back the self-pity. He had lost his mental powers, but not the strength based on moral fiber. Had not Abbot Demero long ago warned of the curse of whining, the sin of believing oneself an object of special care from the Almighty? The thought of the stern old face of his master came into Hiero’s mind, and a reluctant smile crossed his sunblackened face. Yes, Reverend Father, he thought, I am a man again.

True, his hard-won mental powers were gone, but in many ways he had been incredibly lucky. Drugged, bound, and helpless, he had yet escaped his enemies. Though no longer telepathic, his brain was clear and he could think and plan ahead. He could reason, puzzle out what had happened to him, and take action for the future—action and revenge. His black eyes narrowed into burning slits. His enemies would pay for this—pay dearly!

Eventually, Hiero slept, his thoughts still and the memories of recent days mercifully forgotten for the time being.

The little hollow went on about the business of the night. The strange plants were dormant, while the small lives about them pursued their own midget dramas of life and death. Once the stars above were blotted out by something large and dark, passing high and far into the north. But the night shielded the hollow, and the man slumbered on, free of distressing dreams.