Master Of The Hashomi

Then the horse turned on the girl, using both hooves and teeth. The girl was not as lucky as her father, for it took her a long time to die. At first she tried to be silent, then she screamed, and finally she was silent again because her torn lungs could no longer take in enough air for a scream.

Blade also had to exercise a good deal of self-control before the girl died. He wasn't going to cry out and he wasn't going to be sick. He'd seen far too many ugly sights. He did have to grip the railing in front of him, to keep his hands from closing on the lean throat of the Master of the Hashomi and squeezing until life was gone. He was quite certain that he could do that before the other Hashomi could kill him.

At last the only movement around the girl was the flies settling on her wounds. The Master signaled to one of the Hashomi and the man stepped forward, holding a bow with an arrow already nocked to it. The arrow whistled down into the pit, driving through the horse's skull. It reared with a gasp and dropped beside its two victims. The bodies were still lying there as the Master led Blade away.

«Thus the nad is an instrument of the justice of the Hashomi,» said the Master. Blade nodded. He did not trust himself to speak, not when it took a real effort to keep his hands at his sides.

Finally he was able to ask, «You say that any warm-blooded animal will do this under the influence of the nad?»

«Yes. We have tried it with horses, dogs, oxen, goats, and sheep-even the hunting falcons that the nobles of Dahaura love so greatly. All will run mad, smashing and killing as best they can, until they fall dead or are slain.»

«I see,» said Blade. Perhaps he saw even more clearly than the Master intended. What would happen to a city-say, Dahaura-if a few dozen animals maddened with the nad were let loose in its streets? Or a few hundred, or a few thousand? With the nad, not only men but animals could be turned into mindless, maddened weapons of the Hashomi.

Then a question occurred to him. Perhaps the Master would answer it, having already shown him so much. «What about animals whose blood runs cold-snakes and fish, for example?»

The Master's smile was unpleasantly smug. «We have little use for fish. But as for snakes-well, we do something with the fathers of snakes.»

The next day the Master led Blade to another pit, at the mouth of a large cave on the other side of the valley. This pit was more than a hundred yards across and twenty yards deep. Iron spikes six feet long and six inches thick were planted firmly in the rock all around the edge. They sloped inward, to impale anything trying to climb out of the pit.

This time four of the Hashomi with Blade and the Master carried crossbows, and two carried large brass trumpets that coiled around the men's shoulders. The trumpeters walked to the edge of the pit and started blowing. They blew until echoes were bouncing around the pit and from the pit to the slopes above. They blew until half the mountainside above the pit could have crumbled and crashed down in a landslide without being heard. The trumpeters began to gasp and their faces turned the color of ripe tomatoes, but they went on blowing.

Finally the blare of the trumpets died, because the trumpeters had no more breath to blow. They reeled back from the edge of the pit, and only sheer will power and the Master's watchful eyes kept them from collapsing. As the echoes died away, the crossbowmen stepped forward, raising their weapons.

Then the earth seemed to respond to the call of the trumpets. Out of the dark mouth of the cave floated a distant rumbling and hissing, followed by the sound of heavy squelching footsteps, and an unbelievably foul odor. It was like every imaginable form of decay and corruption mixed together and multiplied. Blade found himself wanting to hold his nose, and saw that even the Master was wrinkling up his face in uncontrollable distaste.

Then the darkness in the mouth of the cave seemed to come alive, take form, and crawl out of the pit. It was thirty feet long, coal black, and moved on four clawed legs as thick as a man's body. The head was as large as a horse's body, equipped with glaring yellow eyes and a mouth full of crusted teeth a foot long. From the head a double line of sharp spines ran down the creature's back to the tip of its stubby tail. From nose to tail it was covered with scales the size of di

Just as Blade was getting used to the presence of the first creature, a second pushed its black snout out of the cave. Then a third, a fourth, a fifth until the pit seemed to be packed solid with black-scaled flesh. The smell was past description, past belief, and nearly past endurance. Even the Master was now holding his nose with one hand as he motioned the archers forward with the other.

They cocked their bows, raised them, and let fly. Four heavy bolts drove through the scales of the nearest monster, deep into its flesh. It quivered so violently that Blade expected it to fall over and be trampled flat by its mates. Instead it went on quivering like a jelly for nearly a minute. Then suddenly it whirled around, more quickly than Blade would have believed possible, and its jaws clamped down on the flank of its nearest neighbor.

The second monster let out a hissing roar like a boiler venting steam and twisted free of the first one's jaws. A ragged tear showed in its hide, and white flesh laced with pale red blood showed at the bottom of the tear. The wound didn't seem to slow the creature at all. With another roar it turned on its attacker, bowling it over and trying to get a grip on its throat. The long teeth scraped across the scales without penetrating, and the two creatures drew apart for a moment. Then they hurled themselves at each other again.

The fight was long, bloody, and noisy. At last the creature with the arrows in its hide lost the sight of one eye. Its opponent lunged in from the blind side, got its teeth into the throat, and chewed and twisted until at last the flesh tore and blood vessels split to pour a red pool on to the ground. The dying creature toppled on to its side, the tail still thrashing back and forth. Its opponent drew back slowly, bleeding from half a dozen wounds, its muzzle coated up to the eyes with dried blood.

By this time several of the other monsters had paired off to fight, and many more seemed ready to leap at each other's throats. The Master signaled to the trumpeters again, and the blare of their instruments rose until it drowned out even the roar of the monsters below. Somehow it reached their slow wits as a message, and one by one they turned and crept back into the cave. Within a few minutes they were gone, leaving behind nothing but their odor. A trail of blood and fallen scales showed where they'd dragged the dead body into the cave with them.

Blade stepped away from the pit until he felt it was safe to take a deep breath. By the time he could speak again, the Master had joined him. The man's face was paler than usual, and the hands gripping the great staff were white-knuckled and quivering slightly. It seemed there were powers in this valley strong enough to make even the Master of the Hashomi uncomfortable.

Blade decided to take advantage of that discomfort.

«What are they?» he said softly. He could see why the Master had referred to them as «the fathers of snakes.» They were obviously reptiles of some sort, left over from a distant age of this Dimension. But what business did the Hashomi have with them?

The Master's eyes seemed to be fixed on something far off and barely visible. His voice was dreamy, as though he himself had taken an overdose of one of the Hashomi's drugs.

«When the First Master came to this valley, it was theirs.» He went on to describe a sort of lost world, where monsters out of distant ages of the world had swarmed over the cliffs and among the forests.