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The group swept along, not coming any nearer to the forest but heading in a straight line in the direction that Gordon thought of as north. As they passed by, he could see them more clearly. And he did not like what he saw.

  The creatures were neither running nor flying, but doing a little of both. They were stubby-winged avian bipeds, much bigger than Korkhann's people, and lacking the civilized amenity of feathers. They had remained closer to the reptile; the equivalent, say, of the pterodactyl. Wings and body were leathery smooth, a gray or tan in color, and their heads were hideously quasi-human, with bulging skulls above long cruel beaks that seemed to have teeth in them. As with Korkhann's folk, the wings served also as arms, with powerful clawed hands.

  Gordon got the impression that those hands were carrying weapons.

  15

  The yellow sunshine poured down, and a little breeze ruffled the green foliage of the trees around them, and it was all so much like a June day on Earth that Gordon could hardly believe he stood upon the planet of a distant star.

  That was what made the winged bipeds out there so frightening. It was like encountering these grotesqueries in Ohio or Iowa.

  "They're Qhallas," said Shorr Kan. "When Naath Teyn came to Aar to confer with Cyn Cryver, he brought a motley lot of his nonhumans along... and there were two of these brutes among them."

  The men crouched and watched. The nightmarish group went on, looking neither right nor left, heading straight north. They became distant dots and vanished.

  Shorr Kan shaded his eyes squinting. "There... in the distance," he said.

  They could just see another group of flying, racing specks. They too were heading north.

  In the same direction the men were taking. Not, Gordon thought, a comforting idea.

  "At any rate," Shorr Kan said, "it confirms my belief that I saw a town of some kind. Probably a landing field there as well." He frowned, his eyes abstracted but very keen. "I think there'll be some of the count's ships arriving here soon, and the Qhallas are going to meet them. I think that this is part of the gathering of Narath's inhuman clans."

  Something tightened painfully in Gordon's belly. "Gathering... for what?"

  "For the long-planned attack," said Shorr Kan quietly, "by the counts of the Marches and Narath's hordes, on Fomalhaut."

  Gordon sprang to his feet. He set his hands around Shorr Kan's neck. He was shaking, and his eyes were ferocious.

  "Attack on Fomalhaut? You knew this and you didn't tell me?"

  Shorr Kan's face remained calm. So did his voice, though it was difficult enough to get it out from between Gordon's throttling hands.

  "Has there been one minute since I helped you escape from Aar when we didn't have all the trouble we could handle without borrowing more?"

  His gaze met Gordon's steadily, and Gordon let go. But he remained tense, gripped by a terrible fear. And with the fear came an overpowering sense of guilt. He should never have left Fomalhaut, and the Princess Lianna.

  He had known, from the time when Narath trapped them on Teyn, that this attack was inevitable. He should have stayed by her, to do what he could. She had reproached him once that he loved adventure more than he did her, and had been angry with her. But perhaps she had told the truth.

  "How soon?" he asked. His voice was unsteady, so that he scarcely recognized it. He was aware that Hull was talking also, and that he looked agitated, but he could not spare attention for anything but Shorr Kan's answer.

  And Shorr Kan shrugged. "As soon as the combined forces are ready... whenever that may be. Cyn Cryver didn't tell me all his plans. But the ships of the counts will go as a fighting escort for transports carrying the hordes of Narath Teyn."

  "I see," said Gordon, and clenched his hands hard and forced himself to think. Panic now was not going to help either Lianna or himself. "What part are the H'Harn going to play in this?"

  Shorr Kan shook his head. "I can't answer that. Cyn Cryver was very secretive about his relations with the H'Harn." He paused, and then said soberly, "My own feeling is that the H'Harn are using Cyn Cryver and all the others as cats'-paws, in some fashion. As, of course, I had planned to do myself."

  "Have you ever played straight with anyone in your whole life?" demanded Hull Burrel.

  Shorr Kan nodded. "Oh, yes. Often. In fact, I never use deceit unless there's something to be gained by it."

  Hull made a sound of disgust. Gordon hardly heard them. He was walking back and forth, his mind whirling.

  "We've got to get back to Fomalhaut," he said.

  "That," said Shorr Kan, "will not be easy. The people of this world do not have space travel. You saw them. They're a pretty squalid lot."

  Gordon's face set and tightened. "You said that some of the counts' ships would likely land here soon, to take off these Qhallas for the campaign?"

  "Ah," said Shorr Kan. "I think I see what's in your mind. We'll steal one of those ships when they come and take off to warn Fomalhaut Good God, man. Be sensible!"

  Hull said, "He's a blackhearted rascal, but he's right, John Gordon. Those winged devils will be swarming where the ships land."

  "All right," said Gordon. "All right. The fact still remains. We need a ship. Tell me how we get it."

  Hull's big coppery face reflected nothing but baffled anger and distress. But Shorr Kan said, after a minute, "There is one way it just might be done."

  Both Gordon and Hull kept quiet, afraid to break the tenuous thread of hope. Shorr Kan stood biting his lip and thinking. They waited. Suddenly Shorr Kan said to Gordon, "Suppose we swing it. Suppose we get to Fomalhaut. If I know the Princess Lianna, she'll want to hang me at the earliest possible moment."

  Gordon answered, "I'll see to it that she doesn't."

  That was a large promise. Shorr Kan smiled, with a certain unpleasant humor.

  "Can you guarantee that?" he demanded. "Can you guarantee that if she doesn't, someone else... say the emperor... won't do it for her?"

  It was no good lying and Gordon knew it, much as he wanted to. "No, I can't guarantee it. But I'm almost sure that, if you've earned it, I have enough influence to save your neck."

  "Almost is cold comfort," said Shorr Kan. "However..." He studied Gordon for a moment, and Gordon knew that he was mentally going over all the alternatives, checking them swiftly once more before he committed himself. Finally he shrugged and said, "It'll have to do. Will you give me your word of honor that you'll do everything in your power to save me from execution or punishment?"

  "Yes," said Gordon, "If you get us to Fomalhaut, I'll do that."

  Shorr Kan considered. "I'll accept that. If I hadn't known from the past that you're a bit stupid about always keeping your word, I wouldn't trust you. As it is, I do."

  Hull Burrel gave a grunt. Gordon ignored him and asked quickly, "Now... how do we get away from here?"

  Shorr Kan's black eyes sparkled. "There's only one possible way and that's the ships of the counts that will be coming to pick up the Qhalla warriors."

  "But you said yourself we could never capture a ship..."

  Shorr Kan grinned. "That's right. But I have a certain talent for these things, and I've thought of a way."

  He talked rapidly. "Listen. I helped you escape from Aar, and together we killed the H'Harn Susurr there. But nobody on Aar, none of the counts, really knows what happened. All they know is that a H'Harn was found dead, the two prisoners-you and Hull Burrel-were missing, and that I also was missing."

  "What are you getting at?" demanded Hull.

  "This," said Shorr Kan. "Suppose I reappear here on the Qhalla world. Suppose I tell the counts, when they come, that it was you two who killed the H'Harn, and that when you escaped you took me along as a captive?"

  "Would they believe that?" asked Gordon. "Wouldn't they want to know where we are and how you got away from us?"

  "Ah, but that's the beauty of my idea," said Shorr Kan. "I'd have the two of you right with me, you see... your wrists bound, me covering you with the stunner. I'd tell
them that when you wrecked the ship on this world, I turned the tables on you and overpowered you, and how could they doubt it with the proof right before their eyes? Isn't it ingenious?"

  Hull Burell let out a sound that was like a roar. He jumped for Shorr Kan, got him between his hands, and started trying to break him in two.

  "Hull, stop it!" Gordon cried.

  The Antarian turned a flaming, raging face toward him. "Stop it? You heard the bastard, didn't you? He's the same Shorr Kan as ever!"

  Shorr Kan was a strong man but the big Antarian shook him like a terrier shaking a rat. "He's got a beautiful idea, surely. He'll march us in as prisoners, and since his escape didn't work he'll claim he never tried it, and he'll throw us to the wolves!"

  "Wait a minute," said Gordon, pulling at Burrel's arm. "Let him go. Too much depends on this, Hull! Let's talk about it." But the seeds of suspicion were flourishing in Gordon's own mind, and he looked very coldly at Shorr Kan, as the latter stepped quickly back and away from Hull's reluctantly opened hands.

  "It does," said Gordon, "sound exactly like the kind of clever double cross you've always been good at."

  "Doesn't it, though," said Shorr Kan, and smiled. "And I'll have to admit that I considered doing it just that way."

  Gordon watched him narrowly. "But you changed your mind?"

  "Yes, Gordon, I did." There was an odd note of patience in his voice now, as though he were explaining something to a very small child. "I've told you this before and I'll repeat it again. I could stay with the counts and deceive them all down the line, but I cannot deceive the H'Harn, and one stray thought would be the end of me. So I prefer to take my chances at Fomalhaut. It's simple arithmetic."

  "With you, my friend," said Gordon sourly, "nothing is simple. That's why I find this difficult to believe... because it is simple."

  "Then let's find something else to pitch it on," said Shorr Kan brightly. "Friendship, for example. I've always rather liked you, Gordon. I've said so in the past. Doesn't that count for anything?"

  "Oh, my God," said Hull Burrel softly. "Here's the biggest scoundrel in the galaxy, and he asks you to believe in him because he likes you. Let me kill him, John Gordon."

  "I'm tempted," Gordon said. "But wait a bit." He paced up and down, trying to force himself to think clearly against the doubts and the agonizing apprehension that filled his mind. Finally he said, "It comes down to one thing. The only starships that will be coming to this world are the counts' ships. And this is the only possible way we could hope to get one of those ships. We have to gamble, Hull. Give him the stunner."

  Hull Burrel eyed him incredulously.

  Gordon said, "If you can think of another way, tell me."

  Hull stood a moment with his head down like an angry buffalo. Then he swore and handed the weapon to Shorr Kan.

  Instantly Shorr Kan leveled the stunner at them.

  "Now you are my captives," he said, smiling. "Hull was absolutely right, I am going to turn you over as prisoners to the counts."

  Hull's fury went quite beyond reason. He rushed forward bellowing, in the face of the stunner, his hands raised for a killing blow.

  Shorr Kan stepped agilely aside and let him blunder past. Then he laughed, a laugh of pure and wicked delight.

  "Look at him," he said. "Isn't he lovely?" Hull had turned around and was standing uncertainly, his big hands swinging, staring in dumb amazement as Shorr Kan laughed again. "Sorry, Hull, I had to do it. You were so sure. I didn't have the heart to disappoint you." He tossed the stunner in the air, caught it again expertly, and shoved it into his belt. "Come along now. Before we encounter anyone, human or Qhalla, I'll have to bind your hands, but no need for that yet."

  He gave Hull a friendly clap on the back. Hull turned dusky purple, but Gordon could not help grinning a little.

  They started out across the rolling plain, headed northward in the direction in which the grotesque Qhalla bands had been hurrying. The sun sank down across the sky, and then as a rosy sunset darkened into twilight, there was a distant flashing and a rolling crack of thunder, thrice repeated in the clear evening, and they saw three shining starships come down.

  Two hours later, they stood in the darkness of night and watched a scene that might have been lifted straight out of hell.

  16

  Red-flaring torches illuminated the crowded streets of what was less a town than a planless huddle of huts and shanties and ramshackle warehouses dumped haphazardly beside a ford of the river. The Qhallas were not civilized enough to need anything more than a meeting place and marketplace, and it was not a very big one. But it was thronged now with thousands of the winged bipeds, shuffling in the dusty lanes with such a press of bodies that the hut walls creaked at their shoulders. The shaking red light picked out their leather wings and glistening reptilian eyes. Their hoarse voices made an incessant squawking din. They made Gordon think of a horde of demons, and they stank beyond belief.

  The focus of all this big crowd was the three starships that rested on the plain outside the wretched town. Two of them were big cargo ships whose gleaming sides loomed up far beyond the torchlight, into the darkness. The third ship was much smaller, a fast little cruiser. The Qhalla horde milled between the town and the two bigger ships.

  "Transports," said Shorr Kan. "The smaller cruiser will be one of the counts directing his end of the operation."

  Hull Burrell said contemptuously, "That mob couldn't do much against a modern star-world."

  "Ah, but this is only part of it, a very small part," said Shorr Kan. "All through the Marches, on wild worlds like this, the same sort of gathering will be going on. All the nonhuman peoples will answer the call of Narath Teyn."

  Remembering how the Gerrn had idolized him, Gordon had no doubt of that.

  "The counts' fighting ships will take on Fomalhaut's navy," Shorr Kan added. "While they are engaged, the massed transports will go through and land these hordes for a direct assault on the capital."

  The words conjured up a nightmare vision in Gordon's mind, and he felt again an agony of guilt for having left Lianna.

  "The Empire is the ally of Fomalhaut," said Hull Burrel. "They'll have something to say about it."

  "But this will be a surprise. By the time an Empire fleet can get there, Narath Teyn may sit on the throne of Fomalhaut. It won't be easy then to unseat him."

  Shorr Kan did not go on to voice the inevitable corollary, though it was in all their minds... that Lianna might not then be alive to reclaim her throne, leaving Narath Teyn as the sole and rightful heir.

  Gordon demanded harshly, "Are we just going to stand here and talk about it?"

  Shorr Kan looked thoughtfully down from the low hill where they were hidden, above the town.

  "If I take you two in as prisoners, I can convince whatever official of the counts is in charge that I'm still Cyn Cryver's ally. But there's another problem." He indicated the milling, squawking, stinking Qhallas. "The way they look, and from what I've heard of them, they'd tear us to pieces before we ever reached the ships."

  "On that I believe you," said Hull. "They're a wild lot anyway, and they're worked up now to the point of madness."

  Shorr Kan shrugged. "No use asking for a sticky end like that. We'll just have to wait until we see a better chance of getting through. But I'd better bind your hands now. When the chance does come, we'll have to move fast."

  Gordon submitted to having his hands bound behind his back, though the prospect of being helpless among the Qhallas was not one he relished. He consoled himself with the realization that his hands wouldn't do him any good anyway. But Hull Burrel flatly refused.

  "Oh, for God's sake," snarled Gordon. "What do you want to do, sit here and die?"

  "I think we'll do that anyway," he muttered, looking at the Qhallas. But he put his hands behind him and let Shorr Kan tie them.

  Then they sat in the grass and waited, hoping for some way to open for them to the ships.

  The blazing stars
of the Marches looked down from the sky. The wind brought the sound of hoarse shouting from where the torches flickered. Gordon smelled the pungent smell of the warm grasses on which they sat, and it was so familiar that it startled him.

  Then he remembered. Long ago, when he was still John Gordon of New York, he had visited a friend who lived in the Ohio countryside. They had sat at night in a summer-warm meadow, and there had been fireflies, and the smell of the sun-scorched grasses had been just the same.

  Gordon felt a sudden shuddering pang of disorientation. Who was he and what was he doing here, in this wild strange place? The sweet grass smell tortured him with longing to be home, on his own familiar world, where the beasts of the field did not speak with the voices of nightmare, nor form themselves into uncouth armies; where there were no H'Harn and the stars were a long way off, and life held neither splendor nor gut-wrenching, soul-destroying fear.

  But then a memory came to him. A memory of Lianna. His moment of hysteria passed. He knew that only one thing mattered now; he must live long enough to get to Fomalhaut with the warning.

  Shorr Kan suddenly stood up. "There!" he said, gesturing toward the Qhalla town.

  Gordon and Hull also stood up. Two men-two human men-had emerged from the milling crowd of Qhallas. They stood a little apart from the throng, as though they wanted air.

  "One of them wears the insignia of the Mace," said Shorr Kan. "An aide or vassal of Cyn Cryver. We'll have to take this chance. Get going!"

  He gave Gordon and Hull a hard shove, and they started down the grassy slope, Shorr Kan coming behind them with the stunner leveled at their backs.

  "Hurry, damn it," snarled Shorr Kan. "Before they go back to the ship."

  They staggered and stumbled down the slope. The light was bad and their bound hands made them clumsy. Now Gordon saw that the two men were turning around as though to go back through the swarming Qhallas to the ships.

  Shorr Kan shouted, a loud call. The two men turned. And the uproar of the Qhallas quieted suddenly as they also turned to see.