Hammerfall

The fever had come back, as if he had taken a wound; and when his vision cleared he saw Norit had clenched her arms across her stomach and Hati had her hands braced before her mouth, gazing at nothing at all.

They had rushed out into the wilderness like novices, they had found their lost, and now they suffered for it.

Tofi came over to find them in that condition. Men were lying in fits and others lying tranquilly staring at the ceiling. “What’s this?” Tofi cried, and then began to back out from under the shade of the tent, as if he feared for his life. They all might be in that condition, in both tents, all but the sane.

Marak roused himself so far as to lift his head. “Resting,” Marak said. “Only resting. Is it time to move?”

Marak! The voices screamed at him, shook him, raged at him with lights. Hurry, hurry, hurry!

“It’s time,” Tofi said fearfully, doubtless longing for Pori, and safety, and sane men.

Marak, pulled Hati up, saw the vacancy in her eyes, and shook her. “Wake,” he said. “Wake. Sleep in the saddle.”

No father, no mother, no sister, no wife, no lover could divert them. Lifelong, one purpose, one need. East. East. East, where the sun begins.

Norit, too, he pulled to her feet. The au’it and Tofi woke the others, and they began to pull the stakes and collapse the tents.

Malin and the soldiers, it turned out, had gone, simply walked ahead of them when the madness had taken hold, and no one had noticed until they all mounted up, and there were two beasts too many. So all their haste to leave Pori was wasted, and no one much cared about three fools madder than the rest of them.

But Marak cared. The land descended, beyond the dunes, in more dry, broken shale, black rock that heated enough in the afternoon to blister a human foot, and the beasts hated the footing… the heat hurt even through their pads, and their long, thin legs had trouble dealing with a skid.

More, there began to be blood on the shale, and off toward the shadowing east, an ominous gathering of vermin dotted the sky.

They were following three fools. What could they expect?

Yet haste! haste! haste! the voices railed, and the tower built itself, and fire ran across the horizon.

“They’re leaving blood,” Hati said, on the slide above him. “This is not safe.”

“What is safe?” Tofi asked with an anxious laugh, from below them. They were on the steep part of the shale, now, and every step the beasts made cracked into a thousand sliding fragments. “What has been safe?”

He no more than said it than there came a loud slippage and dark rush of dust and shale past them, and beasts bawled and shied in a cascade of fragments.

One of the pack beasts had fallen, and took his burden with him, sliding all the way down to the bottom. It flailed and bawled and could not rise from its burden, and it remained a sobering example of a misstep until they could make the long descent and deal with it.

The beast when they reached it had broken bones, and had to be killed: Bosginde did that with a quick stroke and covered the blood-soaked shale with shovelfuls of dry sand, where he could scrape enough together for the purpose.

The water bags had not broken. None of the supplies was lost, except a tent’s deep-irons, which lay far up on the unstable slope, in plain sight, but Tofi ruled against sending anyone up, no matter the value.

“We can cut the beast up for meat,” the potter said. “We can take the best.”

“No,” Hati said fiercely. “Leave it all. Leave all the gear. Let us move. We may have saved those three fools, but we may lose ourselves if we stand staring!”

There was that feeling in the wind. There was disaster about the whole day, and Tofi gave the order to the slaves to apportion out the packs and get them all moving.

Even so, the first crawling vermin appeared among the rocks before they had gotten the packs redistributed.

“What is that?” Norit asked, looking around her. There was a scrabbling in the rocks, a snarl of combat. “What’s that?”

“A feast in the desert gains too many guests,” Marak said. They had followed a blood trail. With the letting of the blood from the beast’s wounds, they had the raw meat smell about them. It carried far on the desert wind: even a man could smell it. Carrying pack items that might have blood on them had risk, once the carrion-eaters gathered.

Haste, the voices said to him, no delay. No waiting.

The storm would have driven the vermin to cover, and to hunger, and the rearrangement of the land would drive some of the smallest out of their ranges. The whole path of the storm might be unsettled, and that storm track took shape in the back of Marak’s mind the way the shape of the storm had appeared in the images. He sensed desperation in the circling predators. He cursed himself for a fool not having anticipated that Foragi might have been already past reason.

One need not fear the strongest beast on the Lakht, that was the proverb. The strongest would take the carcass. But the weak were gathering, too, and they might follow the second choice. He saw the sky over them gathering with ten and twenty and thirty of the vermin.

“Hurry,” Tofi said to the slaves, as they went about the work with the packs. “You’ll be first and afoot if the vermin come on us! Move, you sons of damnation!”

The first of the flying and the crawling vermin arrived and began worrying at the carcass with them only a stone’s throw away. Another few sent down a shower of shale fragments, coming down the slide.

The quick and the desperate came first. They were not the strongest, only the earliest, the most opportunistic, harbinger of what else would come. They growled and tore into the carcass and the scent of blood and then entrails grew in the air.

“Hurry!” Hati said.

“A’ip!” Tofi yelled. “Ya! a’ip!” The beast the slaves were loading stood trembling, and without complaint, when she gave a jerk on its lead.

More of the flying vermin had landed.

And a glance off across the land showed a furtive, eye-deceiving movement as if the land itself had come to life.

Marak saw Norit into the saddle, delayed to assist Tofi’s women while Tofi railed on his slaves. Osan had gotten up onto his feet.

He did not delay then to make Osan kneel again. He seized the rein, jumped, and seized the saddle, hauling himself up by brute strength until he put a foot in the mounting loop, a move he had doubted he could do. Osan was moving before he could land in the saddle and tuck his leading foot into place. Tofi scrambled up, and the slaves mounted in desperate haste, the pack beasts tethered in line and each trying to move at once.

Osan quickened his pace, flicking his ears in distress, laying them back at what he smelled. The beasts knew what the nomads of the Lakht knew, what Hati had foretold. Marak himself had never seen a mobbing… few in the Lakht had seen it and lived.

The beasts picked up their pace, treading heedlessly, crushing small vermin that chanced underfoot, creatures hardly more than a hand’s length. The mobbing started on that scale, other creatures turning toward the smell of death near at hand, already begi

In an instant what had begun as a flattened multipede became a fist-sized ball of struggling eaters that grew larger by the moment.

All that hunger, Marak thought, only a day or so out from the rich oasis of Pori. And the storm had churned it to madness of a different kind, a natural frenzy.

The beshti hit a traveling run, a difficult pace for the unhabituated, and next to a flat-out bolt, which might fling the weak riders from the saddle. Marak held Osan back, and crossed him in front of Tofi’s men, who were about to break ahead.

“Don’t wear them down,” he said sharply. Hati pulled in front with the same advice, and they slowed the impulse toward outright flight. At a moderate pace they reached sand that no longer moved.