BOOK 1

Chapter One

I

It was the worst winter in memory. Even the Wise conceded that early on. The snows came out of the Zhotak early, and by Manestar Morning they stood several paws deep. They came on bitter winds that found every crack and chink in the Degnan loghouses till in frustration the older females ordered the males out to cover the curved roofs with blocks of sod. The males strove valiantly, but the ice-teethed wind had devoured the warmth of the ground. The earth would not yield to their tools. They tried packing the roofs with snow, but the ceaseless wind carried that away. The ranks of firewood dwindled at an alarming rate.

It was customary for the young of the pack to roam the nearby hills in seach of deadwood when they had no other chores, but this bitter winter the Wise whispered into the ears of the huntresses, and the huntresses ordered the pups to remain within sight of the packstead palisade. The pups sensed the change and were uneasy.

Nobody said the word “grauken.” The old, terrible stories were put aside. Nobody wanted to frighten the little ones. But the adults all knew weather like this conjured the beast lying so near the surface of the meth.

Game would be scarce on the Zhotak. The nomad packs of the northland would exhaust their stored food early. They would come south before long. Some did even during the milder winters, stealing where they could, fighting if they had to to seize the fruits of the labors of their sedentary cousins.

And in the terrible winters — as this promised to become — they even carried off young pups. Among meth, in the heart of the great winter, hunger knew no restraint.

In the fireside tales the grauken was a slavering beast of shadowed forests and rocky hills that lay in wait for careless pups. In life, the grauken was the hunger that betrayed civilization and reason. The Degnan Wise whispered to the huntresses. They wanted the young to develop the habit of staying close and alert long before the grauken came snarling up from its dark place of hiding.

Thus, another burden fell upon the harried males. They ventured out in armed parties, seeking firewood and long, straight logs suitable for construction. To their customary exhausting duties were added the extension and strengthening of the spiral stockade of needle-pointed logs and the bringing of snow into the loghouses to melt. The water produced, they returned to the cold, where they poured it into forms and froze it into blocks. With these ice cakes they sheathed the exteriors of the loghouses, bit by bit.

This winter’s wind was like none the pack had ever known. Even the Chronicle did not recall its like. Never did it cease its bicker and howl. It became so cold the snow no longer fell. Who dared take a metal tool into a bare paw risked losing skin. Incautious pups suffered frostbitten muzzles. Fear glimmered in the eyes of the Wise as they bent their toothless heads together by the fires and muttered of signs and evil portents. The sagan, the wisest of the Wise, burned incense and made sacrifice daily. All the time she was awake her shaky, pain-deformed old paws wove powerful fetishes and banes to mount over the entrances to the loghouses. She commanded ceremonies of propitiation.

And the wind continued to blow. And the winter grew more cold. And the shadow of fear trickled into the bravest of hearts.

Huntresses found unfamiliar meth tracks just a few hours away from the packstead, up near the boundary with the Laspe hunting grounds. They might have been made by Laspe huntresses ranging out of their territory, seeking what small game did not hibernate. But the snow held no scent. Fears of the worst became haunting. Could it be that savages from the north were scouting the upper Ponath already?

Remnants of an old fire were found at Machen Cave, not far north of the packstead. Even in winter only the brave, the desperate, or the foolish nighted over in Machen Cave. The Laspe, or any other of the neighbors, would have traveled on by night rather than have sheltered there. So the Wise whispered and the huntresses murmured to one another. Those who knew the upper Ponath knew that darkness dwelt within Machen Cave.

 

II

Marika, Skiljan’s pup, reached her tenth birthday during the worst of winters, when the fear lurked in the corners of her dam’s loghouse like shadows out of the old stories the old females no longer told. She and the surviving pups of her litter, Kublin and Zamberlin, tried to celebrate the event in traditional pup fashion, but there was no breaking the gloom of their elders.

Skits drawn from folklore were customary. But Marika and Kublin had created their own tale of adventure, and over the protests of conservative Zamberlin, had rehearsed it for weeks. Marika and Kublin believed they would astonish their elders, Zamberlin that they would offend the hidebound Wise. In the event, only their dam proved insufficiently distracted to follow their story. All their expectations were disappointed. They tried flute and drums. Marika had a talent for the flute, and Zamberlin enthusiasm on the skins. Kublin tried to sing.

One of the old females snarled at the racket. They failed to stop sufficiently soon. Skiljan had to interpose herself between the old female and the pups.

The pups tried juggling, for which Marika had an exceptional talent. In summertime the old females always watched and cooed in amazement. She seemed able to command the balls in the air. But now even their dam showed no interest.

Desolate, the pups slinked into a corner and huddled for warmth. The chill was as much of the heart as of the flesh.

In any other season their elders would have snapped at them, telling them they were too old for such foolishness. In this dread season the old ignored the young, and the young stayed out of the path of the old, for tempers were short and civilization’s edge lay very near the surface. A meth who slipped over could kill. They were a race with only the most tenuous grasp on civilized behavior.

Marika huddled with her littermates, feeling the rapid patter of their hearts. She stared through the smoky gloom at her elders. Kublin whimpered softly. He was very frightened. He was not strong. He was old enough to know that in the hard winters weakling males sometimes had to go.

In name the loghouse was Skiljan’s Loghouse — for Marika’s dam — though she shared it with a dozen sisters, their males, several older females, and all their pups. Skiljan commanded by right of skill and strength, as her dam had before her. She was the best huntress of the pack. She ranked second in physical endurance and strength, and first in will. She was among the smartest Degnan females. These being the qualities by which wilderness meth survived, she was honored by all who shared her loghouse. Even the old females deferred when she commanded, though it was seldom she ignored their advice. The Wise had more experience and could see behind veils youth drew across the eyes. In the councils of the packstead she spoke second only to Gerrien.

There were six similar loghouses in the Degnan packstead. None new had been erected within living memory. Each was a half cylinder lying on its side, ninety feet long and a dozen high, twenty-five wide. The south end, where the entrance was, was flat, facing away from winter’s winds. The north end was a tapering cone covering a root cellar, providing storage, breaking the teeth of the wind. A loft hung six feet above the ground floor, half a foot above the average height of an adult meth female. The young slept up there in the warmth, and much that had to be stored was tucked away in the loft’s dark crannies and recesses. The loft was a time vault, more interesting than the Chronicle in what it told of the Degnan past. Marika and Kublin passed many a loving hour probing the shadows, disturbing vermin, sometimes bringing to light treasures lost or forgotten for generations.

The loghouse floor was earth hammered hard by generations of feet. It was covered with skins where the adults slept in clumps, males to the north, old females between the two central firepits, females of breeding age to the south, nearest the door. The sides of the loghouse were piled with firewood and tools, weapons, possessions, and such food stores as were not kept in the unheated point of the structure. All this formed an additional barrier against the cold.

A jungle of foods, skins, whatnots hung from the joists supporting the loft, making any passage through the loghouse tortuous and interesting.

And the smells! Over all was the rich smell of smoke, for smoke found little escape in winter, when warmth was precious. Then there was the smell of unwashed bodies, and of the hanging sausages, fruits, vegetables. In summer the Degnan pack spent little time indoors, fleeing the thick, rank interior for sleep under the stars. In summer adult meth spoke longingly of the freedom enjoyed by the nomadic meth of the Zhotak, who were not tied to such pungent spirit traps. (The nomads believed built houses held one’s spirit prisoner. They sheltered in caves or pitched temporary hide tents.) But when the ice wind began to moan out of the Zhotak, old folks lost that longing. Settled meth, who raised a few scrawny vegetables and grains and who gleaned the forests for game and fruits that could be dried and preserved, survived the winters far more handily than their footloose cousins.

“Marika!” old Zertan snapped. “Come here, pup.”

Marika shivered as she disentangled herself from her littermates. Her dam’s dam was called Carque by all the pups of the packstead — a carque being a rapacious flyer of exceedingly foul temper. Zertan had bad teeth. They pained her constantly, but she would not have them pulled and refused to drink goyin tea. She was a little senile and a lot crazy and was afraid that enemies long dead would steal up on her if she risked the drowsiness caused by the analgesic tea.

Her contemporaries called her Rhelat — behind her back. The rhelat was a carrion eater. It had been known to kill things and wait for them to ripen. Zertan’s rotten teeth gave her particularly foul breath.

Marika presented herself, head lowered dutifully.

“Pup, run to Gerrien’s loghouse. Fetch me those needles Borget promised me.”

“Yes, Granddam.” Marika turned, caught her dam’s eye. What should she do? Borget was dead a month. Anyway, she had been too feeble to make needles for longer than Marika could remember.

Granddam was losing her grip on time again. Soon she would forget who everyone was and begin seeing and talking to meth dead for a generation.

Skiljan nodded toward the doorway. A pretense would be made. “I have something you can take to Gerrien, since you are going.” So the trip would not be a waste.

Marika shrugged into her heavy skin coat and the boots with otec fur inside, waited near the doorway. Zertan watched as if some cunning part of her knew the quest was fabulous, but insisted Marika punish herself in the cold anyway. Because she was young? Or was Zertan grasping for a whiff of the power that had been hers when the loghouse had carried her name?

Skiljan brought a sack of stone arrowheads, the sort used for everyday hunting. The females of her loghouse were skilled flakers. In each loghouse, meth occupied themselves with crafts through the long winters. “Tell Gerrien we need these set to shafts.”

“Yes, Dam.” Marika slipped through heavy hangings that kept the cold from roaring in when the doorway was open. She stood for a moment with paw upon the latch before pushing into the cold. Zertan. Maybe they ought to rid themselves of crazy old females instead of pups, she thought. Kublin was far more useful than was Granddam. Granddam no longer contributed anything but complaint.

She drew a last deep, smoky breath, then stepped into the gale. Her eyes watered instantly. Head down, she trudged across the central square. If she hurried she could make it before she started shivering.

The Degnan loghouses stood in two ranks of three, one north, one south, with fifty feet of open space between ranks. Skiljan’s loghouse was the middle one in the northern rank, flanked by those of Dorlaque and Logusz. Gerrien’s was the end loghouse on Marika’s left as she faced south. Meth named Foehse and Kuzmic ruled the center and right loghouses, respectively. Seldom did any but Gerrien have much impact on Marika’s life. Gerrien and Skiljan had been both friends and competitors since they were pups.

The packstead stockade, and the lean-tos clutching its skirts, clung close to the outer loghouses and spiraled around the packstead twice. Any raider would have to come in through a yard-wide channel, all the way around, to reach her goal. Unlike some neighboring packs, the Degnan made no effort to enclose their gardens and fields. Threats came during winter anyway. Decision had been made in the days-of-building to trade the risk of siege in growing time for the advantage of having to defend a shorter palisade.

The square between loghouse ranks seemed so barren, so naked this time of year. In summer it was always loosely controlled chaos, with game being salted, hides being tanned, pups running wild.

Six loghouses. The Degnan packstead was the biggest in this part of the upper Ponath, and the richest. Their neighbors envied them. But Marika, whose head was filled with dreams, did not feel wealthy. She was miserable most of the time, feeling deprived by birth.

In the south there were places called cities, tradermales said. Places where they made the precious iron tools the Wise accepted in exchange for otec furs. Places where many packs lived together in houses built not of logs but of stone. Places where winter’s breath was ever so much lighter, and the stone houses turned the cold with ease. Places that, just by being elsewhere, by definition would be better than here.

Many an hour had she and Kublin passed dreaming aloud of what it would be like to live there.

Tradermales also told of a stone place called a packfast, which stood just three days down the nearby river, where that joined another to become the Hainlin, a river celebrated in the Chronicle as the guide which the Degnan had followed into the upper Ponath in ancient times. Tradermales said a real road started below the packfast, and wound through mountains and plains southward to great cities whose names Marika could never recall.

Marika’s dam had been to that stone packfast several times. Each year the great ones who dwelt there summoned the leading females of the upper Ponath. Skiljan would be gone for ten days. It was said there were ceremonies and payments of tribute, but about none of that would Skiljan speak, except to mutter under her breath, “Silth bitches,” and say, “In time, Marika. In due time. It is not a thing to be rushed.” Skiljan was not one to frighten, yet she seemed afraid to have her pups visit.

Other pups, younger than Marika, had gone last summer, returning with tales of wonder, thrilled to have something about which to brag. But Skiljan would not yield. Already she and Marika had clashed about the summer to come.

Marika realized she had stopped moving, was standing in the wind and shivering. Dreamer, the huntresses and Wise called her mockingly — and sometimes, when they thought she was not attentive, with little side glances larded with uncertainty or fright — and they were right. It was a good thing pups were not permitted into the forest now. Her dreaming had become uncontrolled. She would find some early frostflower or pretty creekside pebble and the grauken would get her while she contemplated its beauty.

She entered Gerrien’s loghouse. Its interior was very like Skiljan’s. The odors were a touch different. Gerrien housed more males, and the wintertime crafts of her loghouse all involved woodworking. Logusz’s loghouse always smelled worst. Her meth were mainly tanners and leather workers.

Marika stood before the windskins, waiting to be recognized. It was but a moment before Gerrien sent a pup to investigate. This was a loghouse more relaxed than that ruled by Skiljan. There was more merriment here, always, and more happiness. Gerriaen was not intimidated by the hard life of the upper Ponath. She took what came and refused to battle the future before it arrived. Marika sometimes wished she had been whelped by cheerful Gerrien instead of brooding Skiljan.

“What?” demanded Solfrank, a male two years her elder, almost ready for the rites of adulthood, which would compel him to depart the packstead and wander the upper Ponath in search of a pack that would take him in. His chances were excellent. Degnan males took with them envied education and skills.

Marika did not like Solfrank. The dislike was mutual. It extended back years, to a time when the male had thought his age advantage more than overbalanced his sexual handicap. He had bullied; Marika had refused to yield; young teeth had been bared; the older pup had been forced to submit. Solfrank never would forgive her the humiliation. The grudge was well-known. It was a stain he would bear with him in his search for a new pack.

“Dam sends me with two score and ten arrowheads ready for the shaft.” Marika bared teeth slightly. A hint of mockery, a hint of I-dare-you. “Granddam wants the needles Borget promised.”

Marika reflected that Kublin liked Solfrank. When he was not tagging after her, he trotted around after Gerrien’s whelp — and brought back all the corrupt ideas Solfrank whispered in his ear. At least Zamberlin knew him for what he was and viewed him with due contempt.

Solfrank bared his teeth, pleasured by further evidence that those who dwelt in Skiljan’s loghouse were mad. “I’ll tell Dam.”

In minutes Marika clutched a bundle of ready arrows. Gerrien herself brought a small piece of fine skin in which she had wrapped several bone needles. “These were Borget’s. Tell Skiljan we will want them back.”

Not the iron needles. The iron were too precious. But... Marika did not understand till she was outside again.

Gerrien did not expect Zertan to live much longer. These few needles, which had belonged to her sometime friend — and as often in council, enemy — might pleasure her in her failing days. Though she did not like her granddam, a tear formed in the corner of Marika’s eye. It froze quickly and stung, and she brushed at it irritably with a heavily gloved paw.

She was just three steps from home when she heard the cry on the wind, faint and far and almost indiscernible. She had not heard such a cry before, but she knew it instantly. That was the cry of a meth in sudden pain.

Degnan huntresses were out, as they were every day when time were hard. Males were out seeking deadwood. There might be trouble. She hurried inside and did not wait to be recognized before she started babbling. “It came from the direction of Machen Cave,” she concluded, shuddering. She was afraid of Machen Cave.

Skiljan exchanged looks with her lieutenants. “Up the ladder now, pup,” she said. “Up the ladder.”

“But Dam...” Marika wilted before a fierce look. She scurried up the ladder. The other pups greeted her with questions. She ignored them, huddled with Kublin. “It came from the direction of Machen Cave.”

“That’s miles away,” Kublin reminded.

“I know.” Maybe she had imagined the cry. Dreamed it. “But it came from that direction. That’s all I said. I didn’t claim it came from the cave.”

Kublin shivered. He said nothing more. Neither did Marika.

They were very afraid of Machen Cave, those pups. They believed they had been given reason.

 

III

It had been high summer, a time when danger was all of one’s own making. Pups were allowed free run of forest and hill, that they might come to know their pack’s territory. Their work and play were all shaped to teach skills adults would need to survive to raise their own pups.

Marika almost always ran with her littermates, especially Kublin. Zamberlin seldom did anything not required of him.

Kublin, though, hadn’t Marika’s stamina, strength, or nerve. She sometimes became impatient with him. In her crueler moments she would hide and force him to find his own way. He did so whining, complaining, sullenly, and slow, but he always managed. He was capable enough at his own pace.

North and east of the packstead stood Stapen Rock, a bizarre basalt upthrust the early Wise designated as spiritually and ritually significant. At Stapen Rock the Wise communed with the spirits of the forest and made offerings meant to assure good hunting, rich mast crops, fat and juicy berries, and a plentitude of chote. Chote being a knee-high plant edible in leaf, fruit, and fat, sweet, tuberous root. The root would store indefinitely in a dark, cool, dry place.

Stapen Rock was the chief of five such natural shrines recalling old Degnan animistic traditions. Others were dedicated to the spirits of air and water, fire and the underworld. The All itself, supercessor of the old way, was sanctified within the loghouses themselves.

Machen Cave, gateway to the world below, centered the shadowed side of life. Pohsit, sagan in Skiljan’s loghouse, and her like visited Machen Cave regularly, propitiating shadows and the dead, refreshing spells which bound the gateway against those.

The Degnan were not superstitious by the standards of the Ponath, but in the case of shadows no offering was spared to avert baleful influences. The spells sealing the cave were always numerous and fresh.

Marika played a game with herself and Kublin, one that stretched their courage. It required them to approach the fane nearer than fear would permit. Timid, Kublin remained ever close to her when they ran the woods. If, perforce, he went with her.

Marika had been playing that game for three summers. In the summer before the great winter, though, it ceased being pup play.

As always, Kublin was reluctant. At a respectful distance he began, “Marika, I’m tired. Can we go home now?”

“It’s just the middle of the afternoon, Kublin. Are you an infant that needs a nap?” Then distraction. “Oh. Look.”

She had spotted a patch of chote, thick among old leaves on a ravine bank facing northward. Chote grew best where it received little direct sunlight. It was an ephemeral plant, springing up, flowering, fruiting, and wilting all within thirty days. A patch this lush could not have gone unnoticed. In fact, it would have been there for years. But she would report it. Pups were expected to report discoveries. If nothing else, such reports revealed how well they knew their territory.

She forgot the cave. She searched for those plants with two double-paw-sized leaves instead of one. The female chote fruited on a short stem growing from the crotch where the leaf stems joined. “Here’s one. Not ripe. This one’s not ripe either.”

Kublin found the first ripe fruit, a one-by-one-and-a-half-inch ovoid a pale greenish yellow beginning to show spots of brown. “Here.” He held it up.

Marika found another a moment later. She bit a hole, sucked tangy, acid juice, then split the shell of the fruit. She removed the seeds, which she buried immediately. There was little meat to chote fruit, and that with an unpalatable bitterness near the skin. She scraped the better part carefully with a small stone knife. The long meth jaw and carnivore teeth made getting the meat with the mouth impossible.

Kublin seemed determined to devour every fruit in the patch. Marika concluded he was stalling. “Come on.”

She wished Zamberlin had come. Kublin was less balky then. But Zamberlin was running with friends this year, and those friends had no use for Kublin, who could not maintain their pace.

They were growing apart. Marika did not like that, though she knew there was no avoiding it. In a few years they would assume adult roles. Then Zambi and Kub would be gone entirely...

Poor Kublin. And a mind was of no value in a male.

Across a trickle of a creek, up a slope, across a small meadow, down the wooded slope bordering a larger creek, and downstream a third of a mile. There the creek skirted the hip of a substantial hill, the first of those that rose to become the Zhotak. Marika settled on her haunches a hundred feet from the stream and thirty above its level. She stared at the shadow among brush and rocks opposite that marked the mouth of the cave. Kublin settled beside her, breathing rapidly though she had not set a hard pace.

There were times when even she was impatient with his lack of stamina.

Sunlight slanted down through the leaves, illuminating blossoms of white, yellow, and pale red. Winged things flitted from branch to branch through the dapple of sunlight and shadow, seeming to flicker in and out of existence. Some light fell near the cave mouth, but did nothing to illuminate its interior.

Marika never had approached closer than the near bank of the creek. From there, or where she squatted now, she could discern nothing but the glob of darkness. Even the propitiary altar was invisible.

It was said that meth of the south mocked their more primitive cousins for appeasing spirits that would ignore them in any case. Even among the Degnan there were those who took only the All seriously. But even they attended ceremonies. Just in case. Ponath meth seldom took chances.

Marika had heard that the nomad packs of the Zhotak practiced animistic rites which postulated dark and light spirits, gods and devils, in everything. Even rocks.

Kublin had his breath. Marika rose. Sliding, she descended to the creek. Kublin followed tautly. He was frightened, but he did not protest, not even when she leapt the stream. He followed. For once he seemed determined to outgut her.

Something stirred within Marika as she stared upslope. From where she stood the sole evidence of the cave’s presence was a trickle of mossy water on slick stone, coming from above. In some seasons a stream poured out of the cave.

She searched within herself, trying to identify that feeling. She could not. It was almost as if she had eaten something that left her slightly irritable, as though there was a buzzing in her nerves. She did not connect it with the cavern. Never before had she felt anything but fear when nearby. She glanced at Kublin. He now seemed more restless than frightened. “Well?”

Kublin bared his teeth. The expression was meant to be challenging. “Want me to go first?”

Marika took a couple of steps, looked upslope again. Nothing to see. Brush still masked the cave.

Three more steps.

“Marika.”

She glanced back. Kublin looked disturbed, but not in the usual way. “What?”

“There’s something in there.”

Marika waited for an explanation. She did not mock. Sometimes he could tell things that he could not see. As could she... He quivered. She looked inside for what she felt. But she could not find it.

She did feel a presence. It had nothing to do with the cave. “Sit down,” she said softly.

“Why?”

“Because I want to get lower, so I can look through the brush. Somebody is watching. I don’t want them to know we know they’re there.”

He did as she asked. He trusted her. She watched over him.

“It’s Pohsit,” Marika said, now recalling a repeated unconscious sense of being observed. The feeling had left her more wary than she realized. “She’s following us again.”

Kublin’s immediate response was that of any pup. “We can outrun her. She’s so old.”

“Then she’d know we’d seen her.” Marika sat there awhile, trying to reason out why the sagan followed them. It had to be cruel work for one as old as she. Nothing rational came to mind. “Let’s just pretend she isn’t there. Come on.”

They had taken four steps when Kublin snagged her paw. “There is something in there, Marika.”

Again Marika tried to feel it. This sense she had, which had betrayed Pohsit to her, was not reliable. Or perhaps it depended too much upon expectation. She expected a large animal, a direct physical danger. She sensed nothing of the sort. “I don’t feel anything.”

Kublin made a soft sound of exasperation. Usually it was the other way around, Marika trying to explain something sensed while he remained blind to it.

Why did Pohsit follow them around? She did not even like them. She was always saying bad things to Dam. Once again Marika tried to see the old meth with that unreliable sense for which she had no name.

Alien thoughts flooded her mind. She gasped, reeled, closed them out. “Kublin!”

Her littermate was staring toward the mouth of the cave, jaw restless. “What?”

“I just...” She was not sure what she had done. She had no referents. Nothing like it had happened before. “I think I just heard Pohsit thinking.”

“You what?”

“I heard what she was thinking. About us — about me. She’s scared of me. She thinks I’m a witch of some kind.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I was thinking about Pohsit. Wondering why she’s always following us. I reached out like I can sometimes, and all of a sudden I heard her thinking. I was inside her head, Kublin. Or she was inside mine. I’m scared.”

Kublin did not seem afraid, which amazed Marika. He asked, “What was she thinking?”

“I told you. She’s sure I’m some kind of witch. A devil or something. She was thinking about having tried to get the Wise to... to...” That entered her conscious mind for the first time.

Pohsit was so frightened that she wanted Marika slain or expelled from the packstead. “Kublin, she wants to kill me. She’s looking for evidence that will convince Dam and the Wise.” Especially the Wise. They could overrule Skiljan if they were sufficiently determined.

Kublin was an odd one. Faced with a concrete problem, a solid danger, he could clear his mind of fright and turn his intellect upon the problem. Only when the peril was nebulous did he collapse. But Marika would not accept his solution to what already began to seem an unlikely peril. Kublin said, “We’ll get her up on Stapen Rock and push her off.”

Just like that, he proposed murder. A serious proposal. Kublin did not joke.

Kublin — and Zamberlin — shared Marika’s risk. And needed do nothing but be her littermates to be indicted with her if Pohsit found some fanciful charge she could peddle around the packstead. They shared the guilty blood. And they were male, of no especial value.

In his ultimate powerlessness, Kublin was ready to overreact to the danger.

For a moment Marika was just a little frightened of him. He meant it, and it meant no more to him than the squashing of an irritating insect, though Pohsit had been part of their lives all their lives. As sagan she had taught them their rituals. She was closer, in some ways, than their dam.

“Forget it,” Marika said. By now she was almost convinced that she had imagined the contact. “We came to see the cave.”

They were closer than ever they had dared, and for the first time Kublin had the lead. Marika pushed past him, asserting her primacy. She wondered what Pohsit thought now. Pups were warned repeatedly about Machen Cave. She moved a few more steps uphill.

Now she saw the cave mouth, black as the void between the stars when the moons were all down. Two steps more and she dropped to her haunches, sniffed the cold air that drifted out of the darkness. It had both an earthy and slightly carrion tang. Kublin squatted beside her. She said, “I don’t see any altar. It just looks like a cave.”

There was little evidence anyone ever came there.

Kublin mused, “There is something in there, Marika. Not like any animal.” He closed his eyes and concentrated.

Marika closed hers, wondering about Pohsit.

Again that in-smash of anger, of near insane determination to see Marika punished for a crime the pup could not comprehend. Fear followed the thoughts, which were so repugnant Marika’s stomach turned. She reeled away and her sensing consciousness whipped past her, into the shadows within Machen Cave.

She screamed.

Kublin clapped a paw over her mouth. “Marika! Stop! What’s the matter, Marika?”

She could not get the words out. There was something there. Something big and dark and hungry in a way she could not comprehend at all. Something not of flesh. Something that could only be called spirit or ghost.

Kublin seemed comfortable with it. No. He was frightened, but not out of control.

She recalled Pohsit across the creek, nursing inexplicable hatreds and hopes. She controlled herself. “Kublin, we have to get away from here. Before that notices us.”

But Kublin paid not attention. He moved forward, his step dreamlike.

Had Pohsit not been watching, and malevolent, Marika might have panicked. But the concrete danger on the far bank kept her in firm control. She seized Kublin’s arm, turned him. He did not struggle. But neither did he cooperate. Not till she led him to the creekside, where the glaze left his eyes. For a moment he was baffled as to where he was and what he was doing there.

Marika explained. She concluded, “We have to go away as though nothing happened.” That was critical. Pohsit was looking for something exactly like what had happened.

Once Kublin regained his bearings, he managed well enough. They behaved like daring pups loose in the woods the rest of the day. But Marika did not stop worrying the edges of the hundred questions Machen Cave had raised.

What was that thing in there? What had it done to Kublin?

He, too, was thoughtful.

That was the real beginning. But till much later Marika believed it started in the heart of that terrible winter, when she caught the scream of the meth on the breast of the cold north wind.

 

Chapter Two

I

Having questioned Marika till she was sure her scream was not one of her daydreams, Skiljan circulated through the loghouses and organized a scouting party, two huntresses from each. After Marika again told what she had heard, they left the packstead. Marika climbed the watchtower and watched them pass through the narrows around the stockade, through the gate, then lope across the snowy fields, into the fangs of the wind.

She could not admit it, even to herself, but she was frightened. The day was failing. The sky had clouded up. More snow seemed in the offing. If the huntresses were gone long, they might get caught in the blizzard. After dark, in a snowfall, even the most skilled huntress could lose her way.

She did not stay in the tower long. A hint of what the weather held in store came as a few ice pellets smacked her face. She retreated to the loghouse.

She was frightened and worried. That scream preyed upon her.

Worry tainted the rank air inside, too. The males prowled nervously in their territory. The old females bent to their work with iron determination. Even Zertan got a grip on herself and tended to her sewing. The younger females paced, snarling when they got in one another’s way. The pups retreated to the loft and the physical and emotional safety it represented.

Marika shed coat and boots, hung the coat carefully, placed her boots just the right distance from the fire, then scampered up the ladder. Kublin helped her over the edge. She did not see Zamberlin. He was huddled with his friends somewhere.

She and Kublin retreated to a shadow away from the other pups. “What did you see?” he whispered. She had asked him to scale the tower with her, but he had not had the nerve. For all his weakness, Marika liked Kublin best of all the young in the loghouse.

He was a dreamer, too. Though male, he wanted much what she did. Often they sat together filling one another’s heads with imaginary details of the great southern cities they would visit one day. Kublin had great plans. This summer coming, or next at the latest, he would run away from the packstead when the tradermales came.

Marika did not believe that. He was too cautious, too frightened of change. He might become tradermale someday, but only after he had been put out of the packstead.

“What did you see?” he asked again.

“Nothing. It’s clouded up. Looks like there’s an ice storm coming.”

A whimper formed in Kublin’s throat. Weather was one of countless terrors plaguing him for which there was neither rhyme nor reason. “The All must be mad to permit such chaos.” He did not understand weather. It was not orderly, mechanical. He hated disorder.

Marika was quite content with disorder. In the controlled chaos of a loghouse, disorder was the standard.

“Remember the storm last winter? I thought it was pretty.”

The packstead had been sheathed in ice. The trees had become coated. The entire world for a few hours had been encrusted in crystal and jewels. It was a magical time, like something out of an old story, till the sun appeared and melted the jewels away.

“It was cold and you couldn’t walk anywhere without slipping. Remember how Mahr fell and broke her arm?”

That was Kublin. Always practical.

He asked, “Can you find them with your mind-touch?”

“Shh!” She poked her head out of their hiding place. No other pups within hearing. “Not inside, Kublin. Please be careful. Pohsit.”

His sigh told her he was not going to listen to another of her admonitions.

“No. I can’t. I just have the feeling that they’re moving north. Toward Stapen Rock. We knew that already.”

Only Kublin knew about her ability. Abilities, really. Each few major moons since last summer, it seemed she discovered more. Other than the fact that Pohsit was watching, and hating, she had no idea why she should keep her talents hidden. But she was convinced it would do her no good to announce them. Driven by Pohsit, the old females often muttered about magic and sorcery and shadows, and not in terms of approbation, though they had their secrets and magics and mysteries themselves — the sagan most of all.

Carefully worded questions, asked of all her fellow pups, had left Marika sure only she — and Kublin a little — had these talents. That baffled her. Though unreliable and mysterious, they seemed perfectly natural and a part of her.

Considering mysteries, considering dreams and stories shared, Marika realized she and Kublin would not be together much longer. Their tenth birthdays had passed. Come spring Kublin and Zamberlin would begin spending most of their time at the male end of the loghouse. And she would spend most of hers with the young females, tagging along on the hunt, learning those things she must know when she came of age and moved from the loft to the south end of the loghouse.

Too soon, she thought. Three more summers. Maybe four, if dam kept forgetting their age. Then all her freedom would be gone. All the dreams would die.

There would be compensations. A wider field to range beyond the stockade. Chances to visit the stone packfast down the river. A slim maybe of a chance to go on down the road to one of the cities the tradermales told tales about.

Slim chance indeed. While she clung to them and made vows, in her most secret heart she knew her dreams were that only. Huntresses from the upper Ponath remained what they were born. It was sad.

There were times she actually wished she were male. Not often, for the lot of the male was hard and his life too often brief, if he survived infancy at all. But only males became traders, only males left their packsteads behind and wandered where they would, carrying news and wares, seeing the whole wide world.

It was said that the tradermales had their own packfasts where no females ever went, and their own special mysteries, and a language separate even from the different language used among themselves by the males she knew.

All very marvelous, and all beyond her reach. She would live and die in the Degnan packstead, like her dam, her granddam, and so many generations of Degnan females before them. If she remained quick and strong and smart, she might one day claim this loghouse for her own, and have her pick of males with whom to mate. But that was all.

She crouched in shadows with Kublin, fearing her deadly plain tomorrows, and both listened to inner voices, trying to track their dam’s party. Marika sensed only that they were north and east of the packstead, moving slowly and cautiously.

Horvat, eldest of the loghouse males, called dinner time. The keeping of time was one of the mysteries reserved to his sex. Somewhere in a small, deep cellar beneath the north end of the house, reached by a ladder, was a device by which time was measured. So it was said. None but the males ever went down there, just as none but the huntresses descended into the cellar beneath the southern end of the loghouse. Marika never had been down, and would not be allowed till the older huntresses were confident she would reveal nothing of what she learned and saw. We are strange, secretive creatures, Marika reflected.

She peeped over the edge of the loft and saw that none of the adults were hastening to collect their meals. “Come on, Kublin. We can be first in line.” They scrambled down, collected their utensils quickly.

Two score small bodies poured after them, having made the same discovery. The young seldom got to the cookpots early. Oftentimes they had to make do with leavings, squabbling among themselves, with the weakest getting nothing at all.

Marika filled her cup and bowl, ignoring the habitual disapproving scowls of the males serving. They had power over pups, and used it as much as they dared. She hurried to a shadow, gobbled as fast as she could. There were no meth manners. Meth gobbled fast, ate more if they could, because there was no guarantee there was going to be another meal anytime soon — even in the packsteads, where fate’s fickleness had been brought somewhat under control.

Kublin joined Marika. He looked proud of himself. Clinging to her shadow, he had been fast enough to get in ahead of pups who usually shoved him aside. He had filled his cup and bowl near spilling deep. He gobbled like a starved animal. Which he often was, being too weak to seize the best.

“They’re worried bad,” Marika whispered, stating the obvious. Any meth who did not jump at a meal had a mind drifting a thousand miles away.

“Let’s get some more before they wake up.”

“All right.”

Marika took a reasonable second portion. Kublin loaded up again. Horvat himself stepped over and chided them. Kublin just put his head down and doggedly went on with his plunder. They returned to the shadow. Marika ate more leisurely, but Kublin gobbled again, perhaps afraid Horvat or another pup would rob him.

Finished, Kublin groaned, rubbed his stomach, which actually protruded now. “That’s better. I don’t know if I can move. Do you feel anything yet?”

Marika shook her head. “Not now.” She rose to take her utensils to the cleaning tub, where snow had been melted into wash water. The young cared for their own bowls and utensils, female or not. She took two steps. Maybe because Kublin had mentioned it and had opened her mind, she was in a sensitive state. Something hit her mind like a blow. She had felt nothing so terrible since that day she had read Pohsit. She ground her teeth, on a shriek, not wanting to attract attention. She fell to her knees.

“What’s the matter, Marika?”

“Be quiet!” If the adults noticed... If Pohsit... “I — I felt something bad. A touch. One of them... one of our huntresses is hurt. Bad hurt.” Pain continued pouring through the touch, reddening her vision. She could not shut it out. The loghouse seemed to twist somehow, to flow, to become something surreal. Its so well known shapes became less substantial. For an instant she saw what looked like ghosts, a pair of them, bright but almost shapeless, drifting through the west wall as though that did not exist. They bobbed about, and for a second Marika thought them like curious pups. One began to drift her way as though aware of her awareness. Then the terrible touch ended with the suddenness of a dry stick breaking. The skewed vision departed with it. She saw no ghosts anymore, though for an instant she thought she sensed a feathery caress. She was not sure if it was upon her fur or her mind.

“They’re in trouble out there, Kublin. Bad trouble.”

“We’d better tell Pobuda.”

“No. We can’t. She wouldn’t believe me. Or she would want to know how I knew. And then Pohsit...” She could not explain the exact nature of her fear. She was certain it was valid, that her secret talents could cause her a great deal of grief.

But Kublin did not demand an explanation. He knew her talents, and he was intimate with fear. Its presence was explanation enough for him.

“I’m scared, Kublin. Scared for Dam.”

 

II

The scouting party returned long after nightfall. Nine of them. Two of those were injured. With them came two injured strangers and a wild, bony skeleton of a male in tattered, grubby furs. The male stumbled and staggered, and was dragged partway by the huntresses. His paws were bound behind him, but he did not cringe like the cowardly males Marika knew.

Because Skiljan had led the party, the Wise and adult females of all the loghouses crowded into her loghouse. Skiljan’s males cleared room and retreated to their chilly northern territory. The more timid withdrew to the storeroom or their cellar. But Horvat and the other old ones remained watching from behind the barricade of their firepit.

The pups fled to the loft, then fought for places where they could look down and eavesdrop. Marika was big enough, ill-tempered enough, and had reputation enough to carve out a choice spot for herself and Kublin. She could not draw her attention away from the male prisoner, who lay in the territory of the Wise, watched over by the sagan and the eldest.

Skiljan took her place near the huntress’s fire. She scanned her audience while it settled down with far more than customary snarling and jostling. Marika supposed the adults knew everything already, the huntresses having scattered to their respective loghouses before coming to Skiljan’s. She hoped for enlightenment anyway. Her dam was methodical about these things.

Skiljan waited patiently. Three Degnan huntresses had not returned. Tempers were rough. She allowed the jostling to settle of its own inertia. Then she said, “We found eight nomads denned in a lean-to set on the leeward side of Stapen Rock. On the way there we found tracks indicating that they have been watching the packstead. They have not been there long, though, or we would have noticed their tracks while hunting. The cry heard and reported by my pup Marika came when they ambushed four huntresses from the Greve packstead.”

That caused a stir which was awhile settling out. Marika wondered what her dam would have to say about neighbors poaching, but Skiljan let it go by, satisfied that the fact had sunk in. She ignored a call from Dorlaque for a swift demonstration of protest. Such an action could cause more trouble than it was worth.

“Four Greve huntresses ambushed,” Skiljan said. “They slew two. We rescued the other two.” The Greve in question were trying to appear small. Dorlaque had not finished her say, though no one but they were listening. Skiljan continued, “The nomads butchered one of the dead.”

Growls and snarls. Ill-controlled anger. Disgust. A little self-loathing, for the grauken never lurked far beneath the surface of any meth. Someone threw something at the prisoner. He accepted the blow without flinching.

“Our sisters from Greve packstead overheard some of their talk while they were captives. The speech of the Zhotak savages is hard to follow, as we all know, but they believe the group at Stapen Rock was an advance party charged with finding our weaknesses. They belong to an alliance of nomad packs which has invaded the upper Ponath. They number several hundred huntresses and are arming their males.” She indicated the prisoner. “This group was all male, and very well armed.”

Again an angry stir, and much snarling about stupid savages fool enough to give males weapons. Marika sensed a strong current of fear. Several hundred huntresses? It was hard to imagine such numbers.

“What became of the other nomads?” she wanted to ask. But she knew, really. Her dam was a cautious huntress. She would have scouted Stapen Rock well before doing anything. She would have made no move till she knew exactly what the situation was. Then she would have had her companions fill the shelter with arrows and javelins. That three Degnan huntresses had not returned said the nomads, male or no, had been alert and ready for trouble.

“I wonder if any nomads got away,” she whispered. Then, “No. Dam would still be tracking them.”

Kublin shook beside her. She could have shaken herself. This was bad, bad news. Too much blood. The nomads might appease their consciences with claims of blood feud now, and never mind that they were guilty of a dozen savage crimes. Meth from the Zhotak did not think like normal meth.

Near chaos reigned below. Each of the heads of loghouse had her own notion of what should be done now. Hotheads wanted to go out in the morning, in force, and hunt nomads before nomads came to the packstead. More cautious heads argued for buttoning up the stockade now, and forget the customary search for deadwood and small game. Some vacillated, swinging back and forth between extremes. Because Gerrien took no firm position, but simply listened, there was no swift decision.

Dorlaque shouted a proposal for arming the males within the stockade, a course never before taken except in utmost extremity. Males could not be trusted with weapons. They were emotionally unstable and prone to cowardice. They might flee from their own shadows and cost the packstead precious iron tools. Or in their panic they might turn upon the huntresses. Dorlaque was shouted down.

It went on till Marika grew sleepy. Beside her, Kublin kept drifting off. Many of the younger pups had gone to their pallets. Skiljan entered nothing into the debate but an occasional point of order, refereeing.

After all the arguments had gone around repeatedly, unto exhaustion, Gerrien looked up from her paws. She surveyed the gathering. Silence fell as she rose. “We will question the prisoner.” But that went without saying. Why else would Skiljan have brought him in? “And we will send a messenger to the silth packfast.”

Marika came alert immediately. A low growl circulated among the Wise. Pohsit tried to rise, but her infirmities betrayed her. Marika heard her snarl, “Damned silth witches.” Several voices repeated the words. Huntresses protested.

Marika did not understand.

Gerrien persisted. “Each year they take tribute. Some years they take our young. In return they are pledged to protect us. We have paid for a long time. We will call in their side of the debt.”

Some began to snarl now. Many snapped their jaws unconsciously. There was a lot of emotion loose down there, and Marika could not begin to fathom it. They must be treading the edge of an adult mystery.

Skiljan shouted for silence. Such was her presence at that moment that she won it. She said, “Though I am loath to admit it, Gerrien is right. Against several hundred huntresses, with their males armed, no packstead is secure. Our stockade will not shield us, even if we arm our own males and older pups. This is no vengeance raid, no counting of coup, not even blood feud between packs. Old ways of handling attackers will not suffice. We cannot just seal the gate and wait them out. Hundreds are too many.”

“Question the male first,” Dorlaque demanded. “Let us not be made fools. Perhaps what the Greve huntresses heard was a lie by rogue males.”

Several others joined her in arguing for that much restraint. Skiljan and Gerrien exchanged glances, Gerrien nodding slightly. Skiljan gave Dorlaque what she wanted. “We will send no messenger until we have questioned the captive.”

Dorlaque carried on like she had won a major battle. Marika, though, watched Pohsit, who was plotting with her cronies among the Wise.

Skiljan said, “Two courses could be followed. We could scatter messengers to all the packsteads of the upper Ponath and gather the packs in one holdfast, after the fashion of those days when our foredams were moving into the territory. Or we can bring in outside help to turn away outside danger. Any fool will realize we cannot gather the packs at this time of year. The Wise and the pups would perish during the journey. Whole packs might be lost if a blizzard came down during the time of travel. Not to mention that there is no place to rally. The old packfast at Morvain Rocks has been a ruin since my granddam’s granddam’s time. It would be impossible to rebuild it in this weather, with Zhotak huntresses nipping around our heels. The reconstruction is a task that would take years anyway, as it did in the long ago. So the only possible choice is to petition the silth.”

Now Pohsit came forward, speaking for her faction among the Wise. She denounced the silth bitterly, and castigated Skiljan and Gerrien for even suggesting having unnecessary contact with them. Her opposition weakened Skiljan in the eyes of her neighbors.

But the sagan did not speak for a unanimous body of the Wise. Saettle, the teacher of Skiljan’s loghouse, represented another faction arguing against Pohsit. She and the sagan squared off. They were no friends anyway. Marika was afraid fur would fly, and it might have had the prisoner not been there to remind everyone of a very real external threat. Fear of the nomads kept emotions from running wild.

Who were these silth creatures? The meth of the packfast down at the joining of rivers. But what was so terrible about them? Why did some of the Wise hate them so? Pohsit seemed as irrational about them as she was about Marika herself.

Was it because they feared the silth would displace them? There seemed an undercurrent of that.

Unexpectedly, old Zertan shrieked, “Trapped between grauken and the All! I warned you. I warned you all. Do not stint the rituals, I said. But you would not listen.”

After the first instant of surprise, Granddam was talking to air. Even her contemporaries ignored her. For a moment Marika pitied her. To this end an entire life. To become old and ignored in the loghouse one once ruled.

Marika firmed her emotions. Zertan had had her day. Her mind and strength were gone. It was best she stepped aside. Only, among the meth, one never stepped. One was pushed. All life long, one pushed and was pushed, and the strong survived.

And where did that leave the Kublins, brilliant but physically weak? Kublin, Marika knew, would not be alive now had he not been blessed with a mind that overshadowed those of the other pups. He was able to think his way around many of his weaknesses and talk his way out of much of the trouble that found him.

Below, the policy discussion raged on, but the real decisions had been made. The prisoner would be questioned, then a runner would be sent to the packfast. Everyone would remain inside the stockade till she returned. Food and firewood rationing would begin immediately, though there was plenty of both in storage. The loghouses would bring out their hidden stores of iron weapons and prepare them. The pack would outwait the nomads if possible, hoping that either hunger would move them toward easier prey or the packfast would send help. Hard decisions would await developments.

Hard decisions. Like winnowing the pack by pushing the old and weak and youngest male pups outside the stockade. Marika shuddered.

And then she fell asleep, though she had been determined to stay awake till the last outsider left.

 

III

With their interest thoroughly piqued, Marika and Kublin visited Machen Cave often. Each time they took advantage of their youth to shake Pohsit, running long circles, often dashing all the way down to the bank of the Hainlin before turning back to cross the hills and woods to where the cavern lay. The sagan could have tracked them by scent, had she the will, but after five miles of ups and downs old muscles gave out. Pohsit would limp back to the packstead, jaw grimly set. There she would grumble and mutter to the Wise, but dared not indict the pups before their dam. Not just for running her to exhaustion. That would be viewed as common youthful insolence.

Pohsit knew they were running her. And they knew she knew. It was a cruel pup’s game. And Kublin often repeated his suggestion of escalated cruelty. Marika refused to take him seriously.

Pohsit never discovered that they were running to Machen Cave. Else she would have gone there and waited, and been delighted by what she saw.

That thing that Kublin had sensed first remained in or around the cavern. The sinister air was there always, though the pups never discovered its cause.

Its very existence opened their minds. Marika found herself unearthing more and more inexplicable and unpredictable talents. She found that she could locate anyone she knew usually just by concentrating and reaching out. She found that she could, at times, catch a glimmer of thought when she concentrated on wanting to know what was in the mind of someone she could see.

Such abilities frightened her even though she began using them.

It must be something of the sort that upset Pohsit so, she thought. But why were Pohsit’s intentions so deadly?

There was a nostalgic, sad tone to their prowlings that summer, for they knew it was the last when they could run completely free. Adulthood, with its responsibilities and taboos, was bearing down.

After the ground became sufficiently dry to permit tilling, the Degnan began spring planting around their stockade. Upper Ponath agriculture was crude. The meth raised one grain, which had come north with tradermales only a generation earlier, and a few scrawny, semidomesticated root vegetables. The meth diet was heavy on meats, for they were a species descended of carnivores and were just beginning a transition to the omnivorous state. Their grown things were but a supplement making surviving winter less difficult.

Males and pups did the ground breaking, two males pulling a forked branch plow, the blade of which had been hardened in fire. The earth was turned up only a few inches deep. During the growing season the pups spent much of their time weeding.

Summers were busy for the huntresses, for the upper Ponath meth kept no domesticated animals. All meat came of game.

Their cousins in the south did herd meat animals. Several packs had had tradermales bring breeding stock north, but the beasts were not hardy enough to survive the winters.

Tradermales had suggested keeping the animals in the loghouses during the bitter months. The huntresses sneered at such silliness. Share a loghouse with beasts! Tradermales had shown how to construct a multiple-level loghouse, leaving the lowest level for animals, whose body heat would help warm the upper levels. But that was a change in ways. The meth of the upper Ponath viewed change with deep suspicion.

They suspected the traders of everything, for those males did not conform even remotely to traditional male roles.

Yet one of the high anticipations of spring was the coming of tradermales, with their news of the world, their wild tales, their precious trade goods. Each year they came trekking up the Hainlin, sometimes only a handful carrying their wares in packs on their backs, sometimes a train with beasts of burden. The magnitude of their coming depended upon what the Wise of the packs had ordered the summer before.

The dreamers Marika and Kublin awaited their coming with an anticipation greater than that of their packmates. They plagued the outsiders with ten thousand questions, none of which they seemed to mind. They answered in amusement, spinning wondrous tales. Some were so tall Marika accused them of lying. That amused them even more.

In the year of Machen Cave the anticipation was especially high, for Saettle had ordered a new book brought to the packstead, and much of the winter before the huntresses of Skiljan’s loghouse had trapped otec to acquire furs sufficient to pay for it. The snows were gone and the fields were plowed. The greater and lesser moons approached the proper conjunction. The excitement was barely restrained. It was near time for spring rites as well as for the advent of strangers.

But the tradermales did not come.

While they were days late, no one worried. When they were weeks behind, meth wondered, and messengers ran between packsteads asking if tradermales had been seen. There was grave concern among packs which had ordered goods the lack of which might make surviving winter difficult.

They were very late, but they did come at last, without an explanation of why. They were less friendly than in the past, more hurried and harried, lacking in patience. At most packsteads they remained only hours before moving along. There was little spreading of news or telling of tales.

At the Degnan packstead a group nighted over, for the Degnan packstead was known as one of the most comfortable and hospitable. The traders told a few tales by firelight in the square at the center of the packstead, as though in token for their keep. But everyone could tell their hearts were not in the storytelling.

Marika and Kublin cornered an old tradermale they had seen every year they could recall, one who had befriended them in the past and remembered their names from summer to summer. Never shy, Marika asked, “What is the matter this summer, Khronen? Why did you come so late? Why are you all so unhappy?”

This old male was not as grave as the others. One reason they liked him so was that he was a jolly sort, still possessing some of the mischief of a pup. A bit of that shone through now. “The greater world, pups. The greater world. Odd things are stirring. A taint of them has reached this far.”

Marika did not understand. She said so.

“Well, little one, consider our brotherhood as a pack stretching across all the world. Now think about what happens when there is argument between loghouses in your packstead. The loghouses of the brotherhood are at odds. There has been heated division. Everyone is frightened of what it may mean. We are all anxious to finish the season and return, lest something be missed in our absence. Do you see that?”

Both pups understood well enough. Skiljan and Gerrien often allied against other heads of loghouse. Within Skiljan’s loghouse itself there was factionalism, especially among the Wise. The old females plotted and skirmished and betrayed one another in small ways, constantly, for the amusement of it. They were too old to be entertained by anything else.

Skiljan joined Marika, Kublin, and the old tradermale. She called him by name and, when the pups were surprised, admitted, “I have known Khronen many years. Since he was only a year older that Kublin.”

Khronen nodded. “Since before I joined the traders.”

“You are Degnan?” Marika asked.

“No. I was Laspe. Your dam and I encountered one another down by the river when we were your age. She tried to poach some Laspe blackberries. I caught her. It was a grand row.”

Marika looked from the male to Skiljan and back. Seldom did she think of her dam having been a pup.

Skiljan growled, “You persist in that lie. After all these years I would think you could admit that you were trespassing on Degnan ground.”

“After all these years I could still find my way to that berry patch and show that it is on Laspe ground.”

Marika saw her dam was growing angry. She tried to think of a way to calm her. But Khronen stepped in instead. “That is neither here nor there, now,” he said. To Kublin, he added, “She will never grow comfortable with males who do not whimper and cringe when she bares her fangs.” Back to Skiljan, “You have something on your mind, old opponent?”

“I overheard what you said to the pups. I suspect that something which so stresses the tradermale brethren might affect the fortunes of my pack. It occurred to me that you might advise us in ways we might serve ourselves as a result.”

Khronen nodded. “Yes. There are things I cannot say, of course. But I can advise.” He was thoughtful for a time. Then he said, “I suggest you look to your defenses. It may be a harsh winter. I would suggest you invest in the best iron arrowheads, knives, and axes.”

“You sell them too dearly.”

“I am selling nothing. I am telling you what I believe the wise huntress would do if she were privy to the knowledge I possess. You are free to ignore me, as you so often do. Equally, you are free to buy. Or to make your own arrowheads and whatnot of stone, faithful to the old ways.”

“You were always sarcastic, were you not?”

“I have always been possessed of a certain intolerance toward attitudes and beliefs held by the huntresses and Wise of the upper Ponath. Clinging to ways and beliefs obviously false serves no one well.”

Skiljan bared her teeth. But Khronen did not submit, as a male of the Degnan might.

The pack’s attitudes toward tradermale tools and weapons certainly baffled Marika. They dwarfed the stone in quality, yet seldom were used. Each summer the Wise and huntresses bought axes, arrowheads, knives both long and short, and even the occasional iron plowshare. Whatever they could afford. And almost always those purchases went into hiding and were hoarded, never to be used, deemed too precious to be risked.

What was the point?

Skiljan and Gerrien traded all their otec furs for worked iron that summer.

And so that summer laid another shadow of tomorrow upon Marika’s path.

 

Chapter Three

I

The first enraged tentacles of the blizzard were lashing around the loghouse. Down on the ground floor, the argument persisted still, though now most of the spirit was out of it, most of the outside huntresses had returned to their loghouses, and those who remained did so purely out of perverse stubbornness.

Marika was just wakening, right where she had fallen asleep, when old Saettle left the press and approached the foot of the ladder. She beckoned. “Pups down here. Time for lessons.”

“Now?” Marika asked.

“Yes. Come down.”

Shivering, those pups old enough for lessons slipped down and eased past the still snarling adults. Saettle settled them on the male side, according to age and learning development, and brought out the books.

There were six of those, and they were the most precious possessions of the loghouse. Some had been recopied many times, at great expense in otec furs. Some were newer.

The pack, and especially those who dwelt in Skiljan’s loghouse, was proud of its literacy. Even most Degnan males learned to read, write, and cipher. Though not consciously done as a social investment, this literacy was very useful in helping Degnan males survive once they were sent forth from the packstead. Such skills made them welcome in the other packsteads of the upper Ponath.

Early on Marika had noticed the importance of motivation in learning. Males, when young, were as bored by the lessons as were most of the female pups. But as the males neared adulthood and the spring rites which would see them sent forth from the packstead to find a new pack or perish, their level of interest increased exponentially.

The central thread of pack education was the Chronicle, a record that traced pack history from its legendary founder, Bognan, a rogue male who carried off a female and started the line. That had happened many hundreds of years ago, far to the south, before the long migration into the upper Ponath.

The story, the Wise assured the young, was entirely mythical. A tale wilder than most, for no male would dare such a thing. Nor would any be capable, the sex being less smart, weaker, and emotionally more unstable than the female. But it was a tale fun to tell outsiders, whom it boggled. Every pack had its black forebears. Once they drifted into the mists of time, they became objects of pride.

Six books in Skiljan’s loghouse. Almost as many in the rest of the packstead. And the Degnan packstead possessed more than all the other packs of the upper Ponath. Ragged as the packstead was, it was a center of culture and learning. Some summers other packs sent favored female pups to study with the Degnan. Friendships were made and alliances formed, and the Degnan strengthened their place as the region’s leading pack.

Marika was proud to have been born into such an important pack.

The lessons were complete and the morning was well advanced. The angry excitement of the night before had degraded, but the diehards were at it still. Rested huntresses returned from other loghouses. Tempers were shorter than ever.

The prisoner, unable to sustain his terror forever and overcome by exhaustion, had fallen asleep. He lay there ignored, huntresses stepping over and around him almost indifferently. Marika wondered if he had been forgotten.

Some common ground did exist. A watch was established in the watchtower, a task which rotated among the older pups. Most of the less interested adults began preparing for possible siege.

All those precious iron-tool treasures, so long hoarded, came out of hiding. The edges of axes and knives received loving attention. Arrows were mated to iron heads fearsome with many barbs. Marika noted that the heads were affixed to strike horizontally instead of vertically, as hunting arrows were. Meth ribs ran parallel to the ground rather than perpendicular.

More arrows, cruder ones, were made quickly. More spears were fashioned. Scores of javelins were made of sticks with their points hardened in the firepits. The older pups were shown basic fighting techniques. Even the males trained with spears, javelins, tools and knives — when they were not otherwise occupied.

Skiljan, exercising her prerogative as head of loghouse, supported by Gerrien and most of the Degnan Wise, ended the everlasting debate by evicting all outsiders from her loghouse.

The Wise of the pack were more in concert than the huntresses. They issued advices which, because of the near unanimity behind them, fell with the force of orders. What had been preparations made catch-as-catch-can became orderly and almost organized. As organized and cooperative as ever meth became.

They first ordered a short sleep for the cooling of emotions.

Marika wakened from hers uneasy. Kublin was snuggled against her, restless. What was wrong? The psychic atmosphere was electric. There was a stench in it... Pain. And fear. Like that touch when the huntresses were out seeking the source of the scream she had heard.

A true scream ripped up from the ground level. She and Kublin scrambled to the ladder’s head, making no friends among pups already crouched there.

They were questioning the prisoner. Pohsit was holding his paw in the huntress’s firepit. Another of the Wise sat at his head, repeating a question over and over in a soft voice. He did not repsond, except to howl when Pohsit thrust his paw into the coals again.

The pups were neither upset nor disgusted, only curious. They battled for the best spots around the ladderhead. Marika was sure one would get pushed through the hole.

The torment went on and on. Marika whispered, “They won’t get him to tell them anything.”

Kublin nodded. He sensed it too.

Marika examined him. His nerves seemed frayed. Hers surely were. While she did not feel the prisoner’s pain, she did catch the psychic scent of his fear and distress, the leak-over from his scrambled mind. She did not know how to push it away.

Kublin seemed to be feeling all that, too.

Pohsit looked up at them. Her lips pulled back over her teeth in a silent, promising snarl. Kublin inched closer. Marika felt his frightened shiver.

She did not need to touch the sagan’s mind to know what she was thinking.

Probuda, Skiljan’s second, beckoned. “Down, pups. There is work to do.” A massive rock of a female, she stood unmoved as pups tumbled about her, eager to be entrusted with something important. For that was what her tone and phrasing had implied. She had spoken as huntress to huntress.

“Marika. Kublin. You go see Horvat.”

“Horvat? But —”

Pobuda’s paw bounced off Marika’s ear. Marika scooted around the prisoner and his tormentors. He was unconscious. She and Kublin awaited recognition at the edge of Wise territory. Receiving a nod from Saettle, they crossed over to the males’ firepit, where Horvat was supervising some sort of expansion project. He was snarling because the hide umbrella, which gathered smoke to send it up a thin pottery flue, was cooked and smoked hard and brittle, and wanted to break rather than bend.

Marika said, “Horvat, Pobuda told us —”

“See Bhlase.”

They found the young male, who had come to the pack only two years earlier. “Ah. Good,” he said. “Come.” He led them to the storage room. “Too dark in there. Kublin. Get a lamp.”

Marika waited nervously. She had not visited this end of the loghouse since she was too small to know better. All the usual rules were falling...

Kublin arrived with an oil lamp. Bhlase took it and pushed through the doorskins. It was cold and dark in the storage room. It was more crowded than the loft.

But it was neat — obsessively neat, reflecting Horvat’s personality. Bhlase moved about, studying this and that. Marika gawked. The male handed the lamp back to Kublin. Then he started piling leather bags and sealed pottery jars into Marika’s arms. “Those go to the firepit.”

Though irked by his tone, Marika did as she was told. Bhlase followed with a load of his own. He ordered their plunder neatly, set the pups down, gave Kublin and Marika each a mortar and pestle. He settled between them with his legs surrounding a kettle. He drew a knife.

Marika was astonished. The kettle was copper, the knife iron.

Bhlase opened one leather bag and used a ceramic spoon to ladle dried, crushed leaves into Marika’s mortar bowl. “Grind that into powder. I’ll need ten more like that.”

Marika began the dull task. Bhlase turned to Kublin. More, but different, dried, crushed leaves went into his mortar bowl. These gave off a pungent odor immediately. “Ten from you, too, Kublin.”

Marika recalled that Bhlase had been accepted by Skiljan because of his knowledge of herbs and such, which exceeded that of Pohsit.

But what were they doing?

Bhlase had brought several items Marika connected only with cooking. A sieve. A cutting board. A grater. The grater he set into the kettle. He cut the wax seal off one of the jars and removed several wrinkled, almost meth-shaped roots. He grated them into the bowl. A bitter scent rose.

“That is good enough, Marika.” He took her mortar bowl, dumped it into the sieve, flung the bigger remains into the firepit. They flashed and added a grassy aroma to the thousands of smells haunting the loghouse. “Nine more will do it. How is yours coming, Kublin? Yes. That is fine. Dump it here. Good. Nine more for you.”

“Are you not scared, Bhlase?” Marika asked. He seemed unreasonably calm.

“I have been through this before. When I was a pup, nomads besieged our packstead. They are ferocious but not very smart. Kill a few and they will run away till they have eaten their dead.”

“That is awful.”

“They are awful.” Bhlase finished grating roots. He put the grater aside, sieved again, then took up the cutting board. The jar he opened this time contained dead insects the size of the last joint on Marika’s smallest finger. He halved each longwise, cut each half crosswise, scraped the results into the kettle. After finishing the insects he opened a jar which at first seemed to contain only a milky fluid. After he poured that into the pot, though, he dumped several dozen fat white grubs onto his cutting board.

“What are we making, Bhlase?” Kublin asked.

“Poison. For the arrowheads and spearheads and javelins.”

“Oh!” Marika nearly dropped her pestle.

Bhlase was amused. “It is harmless now. Except for these.” He indicated the grubs, which he was dicing with care. “All this will have to simmer together for a long time.”

“We have never used poisons,” Kublin said.

“I was not here last time nomads came to the Degnan packstead,” Bhlase replied. Marika thought she detected a certain arrogance behind his words.

“None of us were,” she countered. “That was so long ago Granddam was leader.”

“That is true, too.” Bhlase broached another jar of grubs. And another after that. Kublin and Marika finished their grinding. Bhlase continued doing grubs till the copper kettle was filled to within three inches of its rim. He took that to a tripod Horvat had prepared, hung it, adjusted it just so over the fire. He beckoned.

“I am going to build the fire just as it must be,” he said. “You two keep it exactly the same.” He thrust a long wooden spoon into the pot. “And stir it each few minutes. The insects tend to float. The grubs sink. Try not to breathe too much of the steam.”

“For how long?” Kublin asked.

“Till it is ready.”

Marika and Kublin exchanged pained glances. Pups always got stuck with the boring jobs.

Over by the other firepit, the huntresses and Wise were still trying to get the prisoner to say something useful. He still refused. The loghouse was growing chilly, what with the coming and going of meth from other loghouses.

“Pohsit is enjoying herself,” Marika observed, stirring the poison. She kept rehearsing the formula in her mind. She had recognized all the ingredients. None were especially rare. It might become useful knowledge one day.

Kublin looked at Pohsit, gulped, and concentrated on the fire.

 

II

So time fled. Sharpening of tools into weapons. Making of crude javelins, spears, and arrows. Males and older pups drilling with the cruder weapons over and over. The initial frenzy of preparation faded as nothing immediate occurred. The lookouts saw no sign of imminent nomad attack. No sign of nomads at all.

Was the crisis over without actually beginning?

The captive died never having said anything of interest — as Marika had expected. The huntresses dragged him out and hurled him off the stockade to lie in the snow before the gate, mute and mutilated. A warning.

Marika wished she had had a chance to talk with the prisoner. She knew next to nothing about the lands beyond the Zhotak.

The huntresses chafed at their confinement, though their restlessness sprang entirely from their minds. In winter they often went longer without leaving the packstead. There were disputes about whether or not the gate should be opened. Bitter cold continued to devour wood stores.

Skiljan and Gerrien kept the gate sealed.

The weather conspired to support them.

Marika took her turn in the watchtower and saw the nothing she expected to see. Her watch was not long, but it was cold. An ice storm had coated everything with crystal. Footing was treacherous everywhere. Males not otherwise occupied cleared ice and snow and erected platforms behind the stockade so huntresses could hurl missiles from their vantage. A few tried to break stones loose from the pile kept for use in a possible raid, but they had trouble. The ice storm had frozen the pile into a single glob.

Kublin called the alarm during his afternoon watch. The huntresses immediately assumed his imagination had gotten the best of him, he being a flighty pup and male to boot. But a pair of huntresses clambered up the tower, their weight making it creak and sway, as had been done with several earlier false alarms.

Kublin was not a victim of his imagination, though at first he had trouble convincing the huntresses that he was indeed seeing what he saw. His eyes were very sharp. Once he did convince them, they dismissed him. He returned to the loghouse to bask in unaccustomed attention.

“I saw smoke,” he announced proudly. “A lot of smoke, far away.”

Skiljan questioned him vigorously — “What direction? How far? How high did it rise? What color was it?” — till he became confused and frustrated.

His answers caused a stir.

Marika had less experience of the far countryside than did her elders. It took her longer to understand.

Smoke in that direction, east, at that distance, in that color, could mean only one thing. The packstead of their nearest neighbors, the Laspe, was burning. And packsteads did not burn unless intentionally set ablaze.

The Degnan packstead frothed with argument again. The central question was: to send scouts or not. Skiljan and Gerrien wanted to know exactly what had happened. Many of those who only hours earlier had demanded the gate be opened now wanted it kept closed. Even a large portion of the Wise did not want to risk huntresses if the nomads were that close.

Skiljan settled the question by fiat. She gathered a dozen huntresses of like mind and marched out. She had her companions arm as huntresses seldom did, with an assortment of missile weapons, hatchets and axes, knives, and even a few shields. Shields normally were used only in mock combats fought during the celebrations held at the turning of each season.

Marika crowded into the watchtower with the sentry on duty. She watched her dam’s party slip and slide across the ice-encrusted snowfields till they vanished into the woods east of the packstead.

When she returned to her loghouse, they gave her the iron axe her dam had been sharpening, and showed her what to do. Skiljan had taken it from the nomads she had slain. It had not been cared for properly. Many hours would be required to give it a proper edge.

Not far away, Pobuda and several others — Wise, males, and huntresses who pretended to some skill in metalworking — were etching the blades of arrowheads and spears. Bhlase sat in the center of their circle with his pot of poison, carefully painting a brown, gummy substance into the etchings with a tiny brush. Marika noted that he wore gloves. The young huntress who carried the finished weapons away also wore gloves, and racked them out of the reach of the younger pups.

Marika soon grew bored with grinding the axe’s edge. She had too much energy to sit still all the time. Too many strange thoughts fled through her mind while she ran the whetstone over that knicked piece of iron. She tried to banish the thoughts, to touch her dam.

There were distractions. The touch came and went. She followed the scouting party peripatetically. Mostly, she tasted their fear. Kublin kept coming to her with questions in his eyes. She kept shaking her head till his curiosity frayed her temper. “Get away!” she snarled. “Leave me alone! I’ll tell you when there’s something to tell.”

Sometimes she tried to touch Grauel, who carried the Degnan’s message to the packfast. She could not find Grauel. But she did not worry. Grauel was the best of the pack in field and forest. If she did not get through, none could, and there was no hope from that direction.

The scouts returned at dusk, unharmed but grim. Again Skiljan’s loghouse filled with the adult female population of the packstead. This evening they were more subdued, for they sensed that the news was bad. Skiljan’s report was terse.

“Nomads attacked the Laspe packstead. They managed to breach the palisade. They took the stores and weapons and tools, fired the loghouses, and ran away. They did not kill everyone, nor did they take many of the pups. Survivors we talked to said the nomads have taken the Brust packstead and are using it as their base.”

End of report. What was not said was as frightening as what was. The Laspe, without stores or tools or weapons, would not survive. The Brust, of course, would all be dead already.

Someone suggested the Laspe pack’s huntresses be brought into the Degnan packstead. “Extra paws to bear arms when the nomads come here. And thus the pack name would not die. Come summer they could take new males and rebuild.”

Skiljan shook her head. “The nomads are barbarians but not fools. They did slay every female of pupbearing age. The huntresses forced them.” She looked at the huntress who had spoken as though she were a fool.

That was the meth way — savagery to the last in defense of the pack. Only those too young or too old to lift a weapon would have been spared. The Laspe could be stricken from the roll of upper Ponath packs.

Marika was amazed everyone took the news with such calm. Two packs known obliterated. It had been several generations since even one had been overrun completely. It was a huge disaster, and portended far worse to come.

“What about the nomads?” someone asked. Despite tension, the gathering continued subdued, without snarling or jostling. “How heavy a price did they pay?”

“Not a price dear enough. The Laspe survivors claimed there were ten tens of tens of attackers.”

A disbelieving murmur ran through the gathering.

“It does sound impossible. But they left their dead behind. We examined dozens of bodies. Most were armed males.” This assertion caused another stir, heavy with distress. “They wore fetishes identifiable as belonging to more than twenty different packs. We questioned a young male left for dead, that the Laspe had not yet tortured. His will was less strong than that of our recent guest. He had much to say before he died.”

Another stir. Then everyone waited expectantly.

Skiljan said, “He claimed the spring saw the rise of a powerful wehrlen among the nomads. A rogue male of no apparent pack, who came out of nowhere and who made his presence felt throughout the north in a very short time.”

A further and greater stir, and now some mutters of fear.

A wehrlen? Marika thought. What was that? It was a word she did not know. There was so much she did not know.

At the far end of the loghouse, the males had ceased working and were paying close attention. They were startled and frightened. Their fur bristled. They knew, whatever a wehrlen was.

Murmurs of “rogue” and “male silth” fluttered through the gathering. It seemed Marika was not alone in not recognizing the word.

“He began by overwhelming the females of an especially strong and famous pack. Instead of gathering supplies for the winter, he marched that pack into the territory of a neighbor. He used the awe of his fighters and his powers to overcome its huntresses. He added it to the force he had already, and so on, expanding till he controlled scores of packs. The prisoner said the news of him began to run before him. He fired the north with a vision of conquest. He has entered the upper Ponath, not just because it is winter and the game has migrated out of the north, but to recapture the Ponath from us, whose foredams took the land from the ancestors of the nomads. The prisoner even suggested that the wehrlen one day wants to unite all the packs of the world. Under his paw.”

The Wise muttered among themselves. Those who had opposed the sending of Grauel to the packfast put their heads together. After a time one rose to announce, “We withdraw our former objections to petitioning the silth. This is an abomination of the filthiest sort. There is no option but to respond with the power of the older abomination.”

Only crazy old Zertan remained adamantly against having any intercourse with the packfast.

Skiljan said, “Gerrien and I talked while returning from the Laspe packstead. It is our feeling that another message must be sent. The silth must know what we have learned today. It might encourage them to send help. If not that, they must know for their own sakes.”

The motion carried. One of Gerrien’s huntresses, Barlog, was selected for the task and sent out immediately. Meth did not enjoy traveling by night, but that was the safer time. By dawn Barlog should be miles ahead of any nomad who might cross her trail.

What could be done had been done. There was nothing more to discuss. The outsiders went away.

Saettle called the pups to lessons.

Marika took the opportunity to ask about the wehrlen. Saettle would not answer in front of the younger pups. She seemed embarrassed. She said, “Such monsters, like grauken, are better not discussed while they are howling outside the stockade.”

It was plain enough there were no circumstances under which Saettle would explain. Baffled, Marika retreated to her furs.

Kublin wanted to talk about it. “Zambi says —”

“Zambi is a fool,” she snapped without hearing what her other littermate had to say. Then, aware that she was behaving foolishly herself, she called, “Zambi? Where are you? Come here.”

Grumbling surlily, her other littermate came out of the far shadows, where he had been clustered with his cronies. He was big for his age. He looked old enough to leave the packstead already. He had gotten the size and strength and endurance that Kublin had been shorted. “What do you want?” he demanded.

“I want to know what you know about this wehrlen thing.”

Zamberlin rolled his eyes. “The All forfend. You waste my time...” He stopped. Marika’s lips were back, her eyes hot. “All right. All right. Don’t get all bothered. All I know is Poogie said Wart said he heard Horvat say a wehrlen is like a Wise meth, only a lot more so. Like a male sagan, I guess, only he don’t have to be old. Like a male silth, Horvat said. Only I don’t know what that is.”

“Thank you, Zambi.”

“Don’t call me that, Marika. My name is Zamberlin.”

“Oh. Listen to the big guy. Go on back to your friends.”

Kublin wanted to talk. Marika did not. She said, “Let me go to sleep, Kub.” He let her be, but for a long time she lay curled in her furs thinking.

Someone wakened her in the night for a brief stint in the watchtower. She bundled herself and went, and spent her time studying the sky. The clouds had cleared away. The stars were bright, though few and though only the two biggest moons were up, Biter and Chaser playing their eternal game of tag. The light they shed was not enough to mask the fainter stars.

Still, only a few score were visible.

Something strange, that sea of darkness above. Stars were other suns, the books said. So far away that one could not reach them if one walked a thousand lifetimes — if there was a road. According to Saettle’s new book, though, the meth of the south knew ways through the great dark. They wandered among the stars quite regularly...

Silth. That name occurred in the new book, though in no way that explained what silth were, or why the Wise should fear them so. It was silth sisters, the book said, who ventured across the ocean of night.

Nothing happened during Marika’s watch, as she had expected. Meth did not move by night if they could avoid it. The dark was a time of fear...

How, then, did these silth creatures manage the gulf between the stars? How did they breathe? Saettle’s book said there was no air out there.

Marika’s relief startled her. She felt the tower creak and sway, came back to reality with a guilty start. The nomads could have slipped to and over the palisade without her noticing.

She returned to her furs and lay awake a long time, head aswirl with stars. She tried to follow the progress of the messengers and was startled at how clearly the touch came tonight. She could grasp wisps of their thoughts.

Grauel was far down the river now, traveling by moonlight, and only hours away from the packfast. She had expected to arrive sooner but had been delayed by deep drifts in places, and by having to avoid nomads a few times. Barlog was making better time, gaining on the other huntress. She was thinking of continuing after sunrise.

Emboldened by her success, Marika strayed farther afield, curious about the packfast itself. But she could not locate the place, and there was no one there she knew. There was no familiar resonance she could home in on.

Still curious, she roamed the nearby hills, searching for nomads. Several times she brushed what might have been minds, but without any face she could visualize she could not come close enough to capture thoughts. Once, eastward, she brushed something powerful and hurried away, frightened. It had a vaguely male flavor. This wehrlen creature the Wise were so fussed about?

Then she gave herself a real nightmare scare. She sent her thoughts drifting up around Machen Cave, and there she found that dread thing she had sensed last summer, only now it was awake and in a malevolent mood — and seemingly aware of her inspection. As she reeled away, ducked, and fled, she had a mental image of a huge, starving beast charging out of the cave at some small game unlucky enough to happen by.

Twice in the next few minutes she thought she felt it looking for her, blundering around like a great, angry, stupid, hungry beast. She huddled into her furs and shook.

She would have to warn Kublin.

Sleep finally came.

Nothing happened all next day. In tense quiet the pack simply continued to prepare for trouble, and the hours shuffled away. The huntresses spoke infrequently, and then only in low voices. The males spoke not at all. Horvat drove them mercilessly. The Wise sent up appeals to the All, helped a little, got in the way a lot.

Marika did another turn on watch, and sharpened the captured axe, which her dam deemed a task suitable for a pup her age.

 

III

Autumn had come. High spirits were less often seen. Huntresses ranged the deep woods, ambushing game already migrating southward. Males smoked and salted with a more grim determination. Pups haunted the woods, gleaning deadwood. The Wise read omens in the flights of flyers, the coloration of insects, how much mast small arboreals stowed away, how deep the gurnen burrowed his place of hibernation.

If the signs were unfavorable, the Wise would authorize the felling of living trees and a second or even third gathering of chote root. Huntresses would begin keeping a more than casual eye on the otec colonies and other bearers of fur, seeing what preparations they made for winter. It was in deep winter that those would be taken for their meat and hides.

As winter gathered its legions behind the Zhotak and the meth of the upper Ponath became ever more mindful of the chance of sudden, deadly storms, time for play, for romping the woods on casual expeditions, became ever more scarce. There was always work for any pair of paws capable of contributing. Among the Degnan even the toddlers did their part.

As many as five days might pass without Marika’s getting a chance to run free. Then, usually, she was on firewood detail. Pups tended to slip away from that. Their shirking was tolerated.

That autumn the Wise concluded that it would be a hard winter, but they did not guess half the truth. Even so, the Degnan always put away far more than they expected to need. A simple matter of sensible precaution.

Marika slipped off to Machen Cave for the last time on a day when the sky was gray and the wind was out of the north, damp and chill. The Wise were arguing about whether or not it bore the scent of snow, about who had the most reliable aches and pains in paws and joints. It was a day when Pohsit was lamenting her thousand infirmities, so it seemed she would not be able to rise, much less chase pups over hill and meadow.

Marika went alone. Horvat had Kublin scraping hides, a task he hated — which was why Horvat had him doing it. To teach him that one must do that which one hates as well as that which one enjoys.

It was a plain, simple run through the woods for Marika, a few hours on the slope opposite that where Machen Cave lay, stretching her new sensing in an effort to find the shadow hidden in the earth. Nothing came of it, and after a time she began wandering back toward the packstead, pausing occasionally to pick up a nut overlooked by the tree dwellers. She cracked those with her teeth, then extracted the sweet nutmeat. She noted the position of a rare, late-blooming medicinal plant, and collected a few fallen branches just so it would not seem she had wasted an entire afternoon. It was getting dusky when she reached the gate.

She found Zamberlin waiting there, almost hiding in a shadow. “Where have you been?” he demanded. He did not await an answer. “You better get straight to Dam before anyone sees you.”

“What in the world?” She could see he was shaken, that he was frightened, but not for himself. “What’s happened, Zambi?”

“Better see Dam. Pohsit claims you tried to murder her.”

“What?” She was not afraid at first, just astonished.

“She says you pushed her off Stapen Rock.”

Fear came. But it was not fear for herself. If someone had pushed Pohsit, it must have been...

“Where is Dam?”

“By the doorway of Gerrien’s loghouse. I think she’s waiting for you. Don’t tell her I warned you.”

“Don’t worry.” Marika marched into the packstead, disposed of her burden at the first woodpile, spied her dam, went straight over. She was frightened now, but still much more for Kublin than for herself. “Dam?”

“Where have you been, Marika?”

“In the woods.”

“Where in the woods?”

“Out by Machen Cave.”

That startled Skiljan. “What were you doing out there?”

“I go there sometimes. When I want to think. Nobody else ever goes. I found some hennal.”

Skiljan squinted at her. “You did not pass near Stapen Rock?”

“No, Dam. I have heard what Pohsit claims. Pohsit is mad, you know. She has been trying —”

“I know what she has been trying, pup. Did you decide you were a huntress and would get her before she got you?”

“No, Dam.”

Skiljan’s eyes narrowed. Marika thought her dam believed her, but also suspected she might know something she would not admit.

“Dam?”

“Yes?”

“If I may speak? I would suggest a huntress of Grauel’s skill backtrack my scent.”

“That will not be necessary. I am confident that you had nothing to do with it.”

“Was she really hurt, Dam? Or just pretending?”

“Half and half. There is no doubt she took a fall. But she was able to walk home and raise a stink. A very inept murder attempt if it was such. I am inclined to think she was clumsy. Though what a meth her age was doing trying to climb Stapen Rock is beyond me. Go now. Stay away from Pohsit for a few days.”

“Yes, Dam.”

Marika went looking for Kublin immediately. She found him where she had left him. She started to snarl, but before he even looked up he asked, in a voice no one else could hear, “How could you do such a bad job of it, Marika? Why didn’t you mash her head with a boulder while she was down, or something?”

Marika gulped. Kublin thought she had done it? Confused, she mumbled something about having had nothing to do with Pohsit’s fall. She withdrew.

Not till next day did she become suspicious. By then trails and evidences were impossible to find. And Kublin adamantly denied having had anything to do with it himself, though Marika was able to isolate a period when no one had seen him around the packstead. She could establish him no alibi. She did not press, though. For Kublin, a male, even circumstantial evidence would be enough to convict.

In time even Pohsit began to wonder if the whole incident were not a product of her imagination. Imaginary or not, though, she let it feed her hatred, her irrational fear, her determination. Marika began to fear something would have to be done about the sagan.

Luckily, more and more of the Degnan were sure Pohsit was slipping into her dotage. Persecution fears and crazy vendettas were common among the Wise.

Marika did her best to stay out of the sagan’s way. And when winter brought worse than anyone expected, even Pohsit relented a little, in the spirit of the pack against the outside.

 

Chapter Four

I

Marika’s next night watch was very late, or very early in the morning. The stars had begun to fade as the sun’s first weak rays straggled around the curve of the world. She stared at the heavens and daydreamed again, wondering incessantly about things hinted in the new book. What were these silth sisters? What were they finding up there among those alien suns? It was a shame she had been born to a pack on the very edge of civilization instead of in some great city of the south, where she might have a chance to enjoy such adventures.

She probed for the messengers again, and again the touch was sharp. Both had reached the packfast. Both were sleeping restlessly in a cell of stone. Other minds moved around them. Not so densely as in a packstead, where there was a continuous clamor of thought, but many nevertheless. And all adult, all old, as if they were all the minds of the Wise. As if they were minds of sagans, for they had that flavor. One was near the messengers, as if watching over them. Marika tried to touch it more closely, to get the feel of these distant strangers who so frightened the Degnan.

Alarm!

That mind shied in sudden fear, sudden surprise, almost slipping away. Marika was startled herself, for no one ever noticed her.

A countertouch, light for an instant, then hard and sudden like a hammer’s blow. Marika whimpered as fractured thought slammed into her mind.

Who are you? Where? What?

There was darkness around the edges of that, and hints of things of terror. Frightened, Marika fled into herself, blanking the world, pinching herself with claws. Pain forced her into her present moment atop the watchtower, alone and cold beneath mocking stars. She stared at Biter’s pocked face, so like an old meth Wise female, considering her from the horizon.

What had she done? That old female had been aware of her. Marika’s fear redoubled as she recalled all the hints and half-heard talk of her elders that had made her determine to keep her talents hidden. She was certain many of her packmates would be terribly upset if they learned what she could do. Pohsit only suspected, and she wanted to kill...

Had she gone too far, touching that distant female? Had she given herself away? Would there be repercussions?

She returned to her furs and lay a long time staring at the logs overhead, battling fear.

The nomads came next morning. Everyone rushed to the stockade. Even the toddlers, whimpering in their fright. Fear filled the packstead with a stench the north wind did not carry away.

There were about a hundred of the northerners, and they were as ragged as Marika had pictured them. They made no effort to surprise the packstead. That was impossible. They stood off and studied it.

The sky was overcast, but not so heavily that shafts of sunlight did not break through and sweep over the white earth. Each time a rushing finger of light passed over the nomads, it set the heads of spears and arrows aglitter. There was much iron among them, and not all were as careless of their weapons as had been the owner of the axe Marika had sharpened for so long.

Skiljan went around keeping heads down. She did not want the nomads to get a good estimate of numbers. The packstead looked small because its stockade had been built close to the loghouses. Let them think the packstead weaker than it was. They might do something foolhardy and find their backs broken before they learned the truth.

Marika did not find that reasonable thinking. The nomad leaders would have questioned meth from captured packsteads, wouldn’t they? Surely they would have learned something about the Degnan packstead.

She gave them too much credit. They seemed wholly ignorant. After a few hours of watching, circling, little rushes toward the stockade by small groups trying to draw a response, a party of five approached the gate slowly, looking to parlay. An old male continued a few steps more after the other four halted. Speaking with an accent which made him almost incomprehensible, he called out, “Evacuate this packstead. Surrender your fortunes to the Shaw. Become one with the Shaw in body and wealth, and none of you will be harmed.”

“What is he talking about?” huntresses asked one another. “What is this ‘Shaw’?”

The old male stepped closer. More carefully, trying to approximate the upper Ponath dialect more closely, he repeated, “Evacuate the packstead and you will not be harmed.”

Skiljan would not deign to speak with a rogue male. She exchanged a meaningful glance with Gerrien, who nodded. “Arrows,” Skiljan ordered, and named the five best archers among the Degnan huntresses. “Loose!” An instant later the nomads were down. “That is five we do not have to fight,” Skiljan said, as pragmatic as ever.

The crowd on the field sent up a terrible howl. They surged forward, their charge a disorganized, chaotic sweep. The Degnan sent arrows to meet them. A few went down.

“They have ladders,” Marika said, peeping between the sharpened points of two stockade logs. “Some of them have ladders, Dam.”

Skiljan boxed her ear, demanded, “What are you doing out here? Get inside. Wise! Get these pups cleared off the stockade. Marika. Tell Rechtern I want her.”

Rechtern was the eldest of all the Degnan Wise, a resident of Foehse’s loghouse. The All had been kind to her. Though she had several years on the next oldest of the Wise, her mind remained clear and her body spry.

Marika scrambled down and, rubbing her ear, went looking for the old female. She found her watching over the pups of Foehse’s loghouse as they fled inside. She said, “Honored One, the huntress Skiljan requests you come speak with her.” The forms required one to speak so to the Wise, but, in fact, Skiljan’s “request” amounted to an order. The iron rule of meth society was stated bluntly in the maxim “As strength goes.”

Marika shadowed Rechtern back to the stockade, heard her dam tell the old female, “Arm the males. We may not be able to hold them at the stockade.” Only the Wise could authorize arming the males. But a huntress such as Skiljan or Gerrien could order the Wise. There were traditions, and rules, and realities. “As strength goes.”

Marika waited in the shadows, listening, shaking, irked because she could not see what was happening. There were snarls and crashes above and outside. There were cries of pain and screams of rage and the clang of metal on metal. The nomads were trying to scale the stockade. The huntresses were pushing them back. On the platforms behind the inner circle of the palisade, old females still able to bend a bow or hurl a javelin sped missiles at any target they saw.

A female cried out overhead. A body thumped down beside Marika, a nomad female gravid but skeletally thin. A long, deep gash ran from her dugs to her belly. Her entrails leaked out, steaming in the cold. A metal knife slipped from her relaxing paw. Marika snatched it up.

Another body fell, barely missing her. This one was an old female of the Degnan. She grunted, tried to rise. A howl of triumph came from above. A huge, lank male leapt down, poised a stone-tipped spear for the kill.

Marika did not think. She hurtled forward, buried the knife in the nomad’s back. He jerked away, heaved blood all over his dead packmate. He thrashed and made gurgling sounds for half a minute before finally lying still. Marika darted out and tried to recover the knife. It would not come free. It was lodged between ribs.

Another nomad dropped down, teeth bared in a killing snarl. Marika squeaked and started to back away, eyeing the spear her victim had dropped.

The third invader pitched forward. The old Degnan female who had fallen from the palisade had gotten her feet under her and leapt onto his back, sinking her teeth in his throat. The last weapon, meth called their teeth. Marika snatched up the spear and stabbed, stabbed, stabbed, before the nomad could shake the weak grasp of the old female. No one of her thrusts was a killer, but in sum they brought him down.

Yet another attacker came over the stockade. Marika ran for her loghouse, spear clutched in both paws. She heard Rechtern calling the males out.

More nomads were over the stockade in several other places. A dozen were looking for someone to kill or something to carry away.

The males and remaining old females rushed upon them with skinning knives, hatchets, hammers, hoes, and rakes. Marika stopped just outside the windskins of her loghouse, watched, ready to dart to safety.

More nomads managed to cross the stockade. She thought them fools. Badly mistaken fools. They should have cleared the defenders from the palisade before coming inside. When the huntresses there — few of them had been cut down — no longer faced a rush from outside, they turned and used their bows.

There was no mistaking a nomad struck by an arrow on which Bhlase’s poison had been painted. The victim went into a thrashing, screaming, mouth-frothing fit, and for a few seconds lashed out at anyone nearby. Then muscles cramped, knotted, locked his body rigidly till death came. And even then there was no relaxation.

The males and old females fled into the loghouses and held the doorways while the huntresses sniped from the palisade.

The surviving invaders panicked. They had stormed into a death trap. Now they tried to get out again. Most were slain trying to get back over the stockade.

Marika wondered if her dam had planned it that way, or if it was a gift from the All. No matter. The attack was over. The packstead had survived it. The Degnan were safe.

Safe for the moment. There were more nomads. And they could be the sort who would deem defeat a cause for blood feud.

Seventy-six nomad corpses went into a heap outside the stockade. Seventy-six leering heads ended up on a rack as a warning to anyone else considering an attack upon the packstead. Only nineteen of the pack itself died or had to be slain because of wounds. Most of those were old females and males who had been too weak or too poorly armed. Many fine weapons were captured.

Skiljan took a party of huntresses in pursuit of those nomads who had escaped. Many of those were injured or had been too weak to scale the stockade in the first place. Skiljan believed most could be picked off without real risk to herself or those who hunted her.

The Wise ruled that the Mourning be severely truncated. There was no wood to spare for pyres and no time for the elaborate ritual customary when one of the Degnan rejoined the All. It would take a week to properly salute the departure of so many. And they in line behind the three who had fallen near Stapen Rock, as yet unMourned themselves.

The bodies could be stored in the lean-tos against the stockade till the Degnan felt comfortable investing time in the dead. They would not corrupt. Not in weather this cold.

It occurred to Marika that they might serve other purposes in the event of a long siege. That the heaping of dead foes outside was a gesture of defiance with levels of subtext she had not yet fully appreciated.

So bitterly was she schooled against the grauken within that her stomach turned at the very thought.

She volunteered to go up into the tower, to watch Skiljan off.

There was little to see once her dam crested the nearest hill, hot on the tracks of the nomads. Just the males cutting the heads off the enemy, building racks, and muttering among themselves. Just the older pups tormenting a few nomads too badly wounded to fly and poking bodies to see if any still needed the kiss of a knife. Marika felt no need to blood herself.

She had done that the hard way, hadn’t she?

But for the bloody snow it could have been any other winter’s day. The wind grumbled and moaned as always, sucking warmth with vampirous ferocity. The snow glared whitely where not trampled or blooded. The trees in the nearby forest snapped and crackled with the cold. Flyers squawked, and a few sent shadows racing over the snow as they wheeled above, eyeing a rich harvest of flesh.

Where there is no waste, there is no want. So the Wise told pups more times than any cared to hear or recall.

The old females ordered a blind set in the open field, placed two skilled archers inside, and had several corpses dragged out where the scavengers would think they were safe. When they descended to the feast, the archers picked them off. Pups scampered in with the carcasses. The males let them cool out, then butchered them and added them to the larder.

There was a labor to occupy, but not to preoccupy. One by one, some with an almost furtive step, the Degnan went to the top of the palisade to gaze eastward, worrying.

Skiljan returned long after dark, traveling by Biter light, burdened with trophies and captured weapons. “No more than five escaped,” she announced with pride. “We chased them all the way to Toerne Creek, taking them one by one. We could have gotten them all, had we dared go farther. But the smoke of cookfires was heavy in the air.”

Again there was an assembly in Skiljan’s loghouse. Again the huntresses and old females, and now even a few males deemed sufficiently steady, debated what should be done. Marika was amazed to see Horvat speak before the assembly, though he said little but that the males of the loghouse were prepared to stand to arms with the rest of the pack. As though they had any choice.

Pobuda rose to observe, “There are weapons enough now with those that have been taken, so that even pups may be given a good knife. Let not what happened today occur again. Let none of the Degnan meet a spear with a hoe. Let this plunder be distributed, the best to those who will use it best, and be so held till this crisis has passed.”

Pobuda was Skiljan’s second. Marika knew she spoke words Skiljan had put into her mouth, for, though fierce, Pobuda never had a thought in her life. Skiljan was disarming a potential squabble over plunder before it began — or at least putting it off. Let the bickering and dickering be delayed till the nomad was safely gone from the upper Ponath.

None of the heads of loghouse demurred. Not even Logusz, who bore Skiljan no love at all, and crossed her often for the sheer pleasure of contrariness.

Skiljan said, “Pobuda speaks wisely. Let it be so. I saw that several shields were taken. And a dozen swords. Let those be given huntresses on the outer stockade.” A snarl of amusement stretched her lips. “They will make life difficult and death easy for the climbers of ladders.” She held up a sword, did a brief battle dance in which she pretended to strike down a nomad coming at her from below.

Marika stared at the sword and was amazed. She had not seen the long knife during the fighting. It flickered in the light from the firepit, scattering shards of red light. She shivered.

It was the first weapon she ever saw which had no purpose other than the killing of members of her own species. Every other had as its primary function use in the hunt.

“But these new weapons will not be enough,” Skiljan said. “Not nearly enough. There is much blood in this thing now. We have dared destroy those sent to destroy us. This wehrlen of the nomads, this ruler over many packs, if he is as mad as they say, will not let this lie. He cannot, for even a small defeat must reflect upon his power. He cannot have that firm a grip upon the huntresses who follow him. He cannot fail and survive. So we will see nomads again, tomorrow or the day after. He will come himself. And he will come in great strength, perhaps with his whole horde.”

A mutter of anger and of fear rippled through the assembly. Skiljan stood aside so the Wise might speak their minds.

“I wish we knew about this wehrlen,” Kublin whispered to Marika. “I wish we did not have to be enemies. It would be interesting to discover who he is, what he is trying to do really, why he is not content, like huntresses, just to take what he needs and go.”

Marika gave him a baffled look. What was this?

Rechtern was first of the Wise to speak. She said, “I have little to tell. But a question to ask. Where did Zhotak nomads acquire swords? Eh? Twelve swords were taken, all were borne by huntresses in their prime. They were swords of quality, too. Yet we here, between the north and the cities where such things are made, have never seen such blades. In fact, we know of swords only from hero stories told us by such as Saettle. The question again: Where did nomads acquire weapons of such quality, meant only for the slaying of meth?”

The entire performance was rhetorical, Marika realized. No one could answer knowledgeably, or even speculatively. The old female merely wished to raise an issue, to plant a seed against the return of summer.

There were no smiths among the meth of the upper Ponath. Nor were there any known to be among the nomads. All things of metal came from the cities of the south, and were sold by tradermales.

There would be hard questions asked when the tradermales appeared again.

After Rechtern almost all the Wise rose to speak in turn, including many who had nothing to say. That was the way of the old females. They talked long and long, harkening to ancient times to find something to compare with what had happened that day. Looking to precedent for action and response was second nature to the Wise.

The normal raid went nothing like what had happened. Seldom was a packstead destroyed, and then only in blood-feud, after a surprise attack. The last such in the upper Ponath had occurred in Zertan’s time. Meth just did not go in for wholesale slaughter.

The pack were awed by the scale of the killing, but not sickened. Death was. Killing was. Their confusion arose from enemy behavior, which was, it seemed, based on reasoning entirely outside their ken. Though hunger drove them, the nomads now lying dead outside the stockade had not come to the packstead simply to take food by force.

There were lessons. Saettle, even wounded, allowed no respite from the lessons. Marika asked for a reading about something similar to what had happened.

“Nothing resembles what happened here, pup. It is unprecedented in our books. Perhaps in the chronicles of the silth, who practice darkwar and whose written memories stretch back ten thousand years. But you are not here to talk over what has been talked over for so many hours. You are here to learn. Let us get on with our ciphers.”

“What is darkwar? What are the silth?” Marika asked. But her questions fell on deaf ears. The Wise could not be moved once their minds were set. She would be neither seen nor heard while she persisted. She abandoned the effort quickly.

Behind the students, arguments over tactics continued. Before them, and on the male side, weapons passed from paw to paw, being sharpened, being painted with poison once more. Both activities went on till well after Marika went to her furs and fell asleep despite all her curiosities and fears.

Once she wakened to what she felt might be a touch, panicky. But it did not come again. Restless, she reached toward the packfast, searching for the Degnan messengers. They were not in the place of stone.

She found them on the path homeward, hurrying by moonlight. Hope surged, but soon fell into the grasp of despair. Drawing closer to Grauel’s thoughts, she saw that only three from the packfast accompanied them. Aching, frightened, she reached for Kublin and snuggled. He murmured in his sleep, but did not waken.

 

II

The stir below caused a stir above. The gouge of elbows and toes and paws as pups clambered over her wakened Marika. Kublin was gone from her side.

It was the middle of the night still. Other slow pups were rubbing their eyes and asking what was happening. Marika crawled to the head of the ladder, where Kublin had gotten himself a good vantage point. Marika squeezed in beside him, oblivious to the growls of those she pushed aside. “What is it?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Somebody from Gerrien’s loghouse came. The huntresses are getting ready to go out.”

He was right. The huntresses were donning their heaviest furs. As if they expected to be out a long time. The males watched quietly from their end. Likewise the Wise, though Marika’s granddam was holding forth in a subdued voice, ignored by everyone. Pohsit, too, was speaking, but seemed to be sending prayers up to the All.

Pobuda began checking weapons.

Something stirred in shadows where nothing should be moving. Startled, Marika stared at the storage area along the west wall, right were male territory met Wise. She saw nothing.

But now she caught a similar hint of motion from shadows along the base of the east wall. And again when she looked there was nothing there.

There had to be, though. She sensed something on that same level where she sensed the distant messengers and the dread within Machen Cave. Yes. It was something like that. But not so big or terrible.

Now she could almost see it when she looked at it...

What was happening?

Frightened, Marika crawled back to her furs. She lay there thoughtfully for a while, recovering. Then she began considering how she might get out and follow the huntresses. But she abandoned that notion quickly. If they were leaving the packstead, as their dress and weaponry implied, it would be folly for a pup to tag along.

The grauken was out there.

Skiljan strode about impatiently, a captured sword in paw, a bow and quiver across her back.

Something had happened, and something more was about to happen.

Marika pulled her boots on.

Below, the huntresses began leaving the loghouse.

Marika pushed through the pups and descended the ladder. Kublin’s whisper pursued her. “Where are you going?”

“Outside.” She jumped as a paw clasped her shoulder. She whirled, found Pobuda’s broad face just inches from her own.

“What are you doing, pup?”

“I was going outside. To the tower. To watch. What is going on?”

Perhaps if she were not Skiljan’s pup, Pobuda would not have answered. But, after a moment’s reflection, the loghouse’s second huntress said, “A nomad encampment has been spotted in the woods. Near Machen Cave. They are going to raid it.”

Marika gaped.

“The tower, then. No farther, or I will chew your ears off and feed you to Skiljan when she gets back.”

Marika gulped, dispensed with the last thread of her notion about following the huntresses. Pobuda made no idle threats. She hadn’t the imagination.

Marika donned her otec coat under Pobuda’s baleful eye. Pobuda wanted to go hunting with the others. But if Skiljan went out, she had to remain. She was not pleased. Skiljan never delegated the active roles.

Marika pulled her hat down over her ears and ducked through the windskins before anyone could call her back.

Pohsit sped a look of hatred after her.

The packstead was cold and dark. Only a few of the lesser moons were up, shedding little light. The last of the expedition were slipping into the exit spiral. Other huntresses were on the stockade, shivering and bouncing to keep warm. Most of the huntresses were going out. It must be an important raid.

Marika started climbing the tower. A face loomed above, unrecognizable. She ignored it. Her thoughts turned to the sky. It was clear again tonight. Why had the weather been so good lately? One ice storm and a few flurries. That probably meant the next storm would be especially brutal, charged as it would be with all the energies pent during the good days.

The sentinel proved to be Solfrank. They eyed one another with teeth bared. Then Solfrank backed away from the head of the ladder, unable to face her down. She scrambled into the precarious wicker basket. Out on the snowfields, the huntresses were spreading out and moving northward, dark, silent blotches against trampled white.

“There,” Solfrank said, pointing. There was pride in his voice. He must be the cause of all the activity.

There was a glow in the forest in the direction of Machen Cave. A huge glow, as of a fire of epic proportion. A gout of sparks shot skyward, drifted down. Marika was astonished.

It must be some nomad ceremony. One did not build fires that could be seen for miles, and by potential foes, just to keep warm.

“How long has that been going on?”

“Only a little while. I spotted it right after I came on watch. It was just a little glow then. They must be burning half the forest now.”

Why, Marika wondered, was Skiljan risking exposing so many huntresses? Hundreds of nomads would be needed to build such a conflagration. Those wild meth could not be so foolish as to presume their fire would not be seen, could they?

She became very worried, certain her dam had made a tactical mistake. It must be a trap. A lure to draw the Degnan into an ambush. She wanted desperately to extend her touch. But she dared not while Solfrank was there to watch her. “How long do you have left?”

“Only a few minutes.”

“Do you want me to take over?”

“All right.” He went over the side of the basket before she could change her mind.

Solfrank, Marika reflected, was impressed by nothing but himself. That fire out there had no meaning except as a small personal triumph. It would get him some attention. He was possessed of no curiosity whatsoever.

Fine. Good.

The tower stopped shaking to his descent. She watched him scurry toward the warmth of Gerrien’s loghouse. The moment he entered, Marika faced north again and tried sensing her dam.

The touch was the strongest ever it had been. It seemed she was riding behind Skiljan’s eyes, seeing what she saw, though she could not capture her dam’s thoughts. Yet those became apparent enough when she directed the huntresses who accompanied her, for Marika could then see what they did, and even heard what they and her dam said part of the time.

Almost immediately the huntresses scattered to search out any nomad scouts who might be watching the packstead. They found none. They then filtered through the woods toward Machen Cave. They moved with extreme care, lest they alert sentinels.

Those did not materialize either. Marika sensed in her dam a growing contempt for the intelligence of the northerners.

Skiljan did not permit contempt to lessen her guard. She probed ahead carefully, lest she stumble into some trap.

But it was no trap. The nomads simply had not considered the possibility their bonfire might be seen from the Degnan packstead.

The fire lay on the south bank of the creek. It was huge. Marika was awed. Skiljan and her companions crouched in brush and watched as nomads piled more wood upon the blaze. The thunk of axes came from the opposite slope.

They were clearing the hill around the cave.

Hundreds of nomads hugged the fire’s warmth.

Skiljan and Gerrien whispered together. Marika eavesdropped.

“What are they doing?” Skiljan asked. Scores labored upon the slopes. One particular nomad moved among them, giving orders that could not be heard. Little could be told of that person at a distance, except that it was someone the nomads considered important.

There were shouts. Boulders rumbled downhill. Nomads scrambled out of their path.

“The cave,” Gerrien replied. “They’re clearing the mouth of the cave. But why baffles me.”

Back of all the other racket were the sounds of log drum and tambor and chanting. The nomad Wise were involved in some sort of ceremony.

“They would not be trying to draw the ghost, would they?” Skiljan asked.

“They might be. A wehrlen... They just might be. We have to stop that.”

“Too many of them.”

“They do not know we are here. Maybe we can panic them.”’

“We will try.” The two separated. During the next several minutes Skiljan whispered to each of the huntresses on her side of the hill. Then she returned to center. Gerrien arrived seconds later.

Skiljan and her companions readied their bows. Marika’s dam said, “Shout when you are ready.”

Gerrien closed her eyes for half a minute, breathed deeply. Then she opened them, nodded, laid an arrow across her bow, rose. Skiljan rose beside her.

An ululating howl ripped from Gerrien’s throat. In an instant it was repeated all across the slope. Arrows stormed downhill. Nomads squealed, shrieked, shouted. Dozens went down.

Skiljan’s shafts, Marika noted, all flew toward the nomad Wise. And many found their marks.

Gerrien arced her arrows toward the meth leader on the far slope. It was a long flight in tricky light, and meth with shields had materialized around that one. None of Gerrien’s shafts reached their mark.

A wild-eyed meth in bizarre black clothing suddenly materialized a few paces from Skiljan. She pointed something like a short, blunt spear. Skiljan and Gerrien were astonished by the apparition’s appearance.

The meth cursed in a strange dialect and glared at the thing in her paws. She hefted it as a club. A pair of poisoned arrows ripped into her chest.

Gerrien then charged downhill. All the huntresses joined her. Javelins arced ahead of them. Nomads ran in circles. Already some were scattering into the darkness up the opposite slope. Only a handful dared counterattack. Their charge was met by huntresses with captured swords, and hurled back.

The panic among the nomads heightened. On the slope opposite, the leader screamed in dialect, trying to stiffen resistance.

Gerrien carried the charge two thirds of the way to the creek, then halted. Sheer numbers of nomads promised to make further going too difficult. After some bloody swordplay, spearplay, and javelin throwing, she loosed another ululating howl and withdrew.

Confused, terrified, the nomads did not press.

The Degnan huntresses loosed their remaining arrows. Every shaft that touched a nomad killed, for each was poisoned.

Once their last arrows flew, the Degnan ran. They left more than a hundred nomads slaughtered. Awe at what they had done would not touch them for some time, for they were too involved with fighting and surviving. But battle and slaughter were not meth customs. There was no precedent for this in the upper Ponath. Fighting in the mass meant holding the stockade against northern raiders, not taking death to the nomads before they struck.

Marika sensed the elation of the huntresses. They had done the nomads great damage while suffering no harm themselves. Perhaps this would compel them to seek easier looting. Now the Degnan needed do nothing but outrun their enemies.

Marika scrambled down the tower, ran to the loghouse. “Pobuda,” she gasped. “They are coming back. The nomads are chasing them.”

Pobuda asked no questions. Not then. She alerted the rest of the packstead. Everyone capable, males included, hurried to reinforce the palisade.

And found there was nothing to see.

Marika got up the tower again and tried to remain invisible. When she did look down she spied Pobuda staring up, paws on hips, looking angry.

A shout rolled out of the distance. Gerrien and Skiljan. Marika could not tell which. As if to offset its earlier perfection, the touch would not open at all. Perhaps she was too excited.

Those on the stockade heard. Weapons came to the ready. Dark shapes appeared on the snowfields, running toward the gate. The Degnan huntresses came in a compact group, with the strongest to the rear, skirmishing with a scatter of nomads darting around their flanks. The nomads were having no luck. But scores more now were pouring from the woods. It looked as though Skiljan and Gerrien would be caught against their own stockade.

Arrows reached out. Nomads went down. Those most imperiled held up. Skiljan and Gerrien faced their huntresses around and retreated more slowly, backing into the now open gateway. Well-sped poisoned arrows kept the pursuit at bay. Marika saw that her dam carried the club that had been wielded by the strange meth in black.

Skiljan was last inside. She slammed the gate. Gerrien barred it. The home-come huntresses rushed around the spiral and took their places upon the stockade, hurling taunts at the nomads.

The enemy made one ragged rush. It fell apart before it reached the foot of the palisade. The survivors fled ignobly. From a safe distance nomads who had taken no part howled ferocious threats and promises.

Marika abandoned the watchtower while all attention was concentrated elsewhere. She hastened to her loghouse and to her sleeping furs, where she tried to make herself vanishingly small against Kublin.

 

III

It was late fall, but not as late as the incident of Pohsit and Stapen Rock. The skies were graying and lowering with the promise of what was to come. The creeks often ran raging with runoff from small but virulent storms. All the portents were evil.

But a spirit of excitement filled the Degnan packstead. Runners from other packs came and went hourly. Wide-ranging huntresses brought in reports which Degnan just out of puphood sped off to relay to neighboring packs.

No sighting, said the reports. No sighting. No sighting. But each negative message only heightened the anticipation.

Marika was more excited than any of her packmates. This was a landmark autumn. This would be the first of her apprentice runs with the hunting pack.

“Soon, now. Soon,” the Wise promised, reading the portents of wind and sky. “The herds must be on the move by now. Another day. Another two days. The skies are right. The forerunners will appear.”

Up in the Zhotak a month or more ago, the kropek would have begun to gather. The young would be adolescent now, able to keep up during the migration south. The nomads would be nipping the flanks of the herds, but they seldom cooperated enough to take sufficient game to see themselves through their protracted winter.

The autumn kropek hunt was the major unifying force of the settled upper Ponath culture. Some years there were fairs. Occasionally two, three, even four packs gathered to observe an important festival. But only during the kropek hunt did the Degnan, Greve, Laspe, and other packs operate in unison — though they might not see one another at all.

The herd had to be spotted first, for it never followed the same route southward. Then an effort had to be made to guide it, to force it into a course that would allow a maximal harvest beneficial to all the Ponath packs.

Ofttimes the post-hunt, when the packs skinned and butchered and salted and smoked, became a gigantic fair of sorts. Sometimes tradermales arrived to take advantage of the concentration of potential customers. Frequently, charitable dams made arrangements on behalf of favored male offspring, saving them the more dangerous search for a new pack.

The kropek was not a large beast, but it was stubborn and difficult prey. Its biggest specimens stood three feet high at the shoulder. The animal had stubby legs and a stiff gait, and was built very wide. It had a thick skin and a massive head. Its lower jaw was almost spadelike. The female developed fearsome upthrust tusks as she matured. Both sexes were fighters.

In summer the kropek ran in small, extended-family herds just below the tundra, subsisting on grubs and roots. But the kropek was a true omnivore, capable of eating anything that did not eat it first. They did not hunt, though, being lazy as a species. Vegetables neither ran nor fought back. The only adventure in a kropek’s life was its long vernal and autumnal migrations.

The meth of the upper Ponath hunted kropek only in the fall. In the spring, for the months bracketing the mating season, kropek flesh was inedible. It caused vomiting and powerful stomach cramps.

A young huntress raced into the packstead. The forerunners of the migration had been spotted in the high Plenthzo Valley, following that tributary of the east fork of the Hainlin. The near part of that valley lay only twenty miles east of the Degnan packstead. Excitement reached new heights. The kropek had not passed down Plenthzo Valley in generations. The good broad bottomland there made travel easy but gave meth room to maneuver in the hunt. There were natural formations where the migration could be brought under massed missile fire, the hunters remaining safe from counterattack.

Kropek were feisty. They would charge anything that threatened them — meaning mainly meth, for the meth were their most dangerous natural enemy. A meth caught was a meth dead. But meth could outrun and outsmart kropek.

Most of the time.

Huntresses double-checked weapons held ready and checked a dozen times since the season began. Messengers went out to the neighbors, suggesting meeting places. Males shouldered packs and tools. Pups being taken out to watch and learn scooted around, chattering at one another, trying to stay out of sight of those who ordered chores.

Skiljan finally gave Marika the light bow she had been hoping was meant for her. “You stay close, pup. And pay attention. Daydream around the kropek and you will find yourself dreaming forever. In the embrace of the All.”

“Yes, Dam.”

Skiljan wheeled on Kublin. “You stay close to Bhlase. Hear me? Do not get in the huntresses’ way.”

“Yes, Dam.”

Marika and Kublin exchanged glances behind Skiljan’s back, meaning they would do what they wanted.

A paw slammed against Marika’s ear. “You heard your dam,” Pobuda said. Her teeth were bared in amusement. “Put those thoughts out of your mind. Both of you.”

Damned old Pobuda, Marika thought. She might be wide and ugly, but she never forgot what it was like to be young. You could not get away with anything with her around. She always knew what you were thinking.

Skiljan, and Barlog from Gerrien’s loghouse, led the way. They set a pace the pups soon found brutal. Marika was panting and stumbling when they reached the Laspe packstead, where the Laspe huntresses joined the column. Marika did not, as she usually did, study the odd structure of the Laspe stockade and wonder why those meth did things so differently. She hadn’t the energy. She had begun to realize that carrying a pack and bow made all the difference in the world.

Pobuda trotted by, mocking her with an amused grunt. Though Pobuda’s pack weighed thrice what Marika’s did, the huntress was as frisky as a pup.

Marika glanced back at Kublin, among the males. Her littermate, to her surprise, was keeping pace with Zambi. His face, though, betrayed the cost. He was running on pure will.

The pace slackened as they went up into the hills beyond the Laspe packstead. The scouts raced ahead, carrying only their javelins. The huntresses moved in silence now, listening intently. Marika never heard anything.

An hour later the Degnan and Laspe joined three packs corning up from the south. The enlarged party continued eastward on a broad front, still listening.

Marika finally surrendered to curiosity and asked why.

Skiljan told her, “Because kropek were spotted in the Plenthzo Valley does not guarantee that that is the route to be followed by the main herd. It could come some other way. Even over these hills. We do not want to be caught off guard.” After walking some dozens of yards, she added, “You always hear the herd before you see it. So you always listen.”

The pace remained slow. Marika recovered from her earlier strain. She wanted to drop back and lend encouragement to Kublin, but dared not. Her place was with the huntresses now.

The day began to fail as the packs descended toward the floodplain of the Plenthzo. Scouts reported other packs were in the valley already. The main herd was still many miles north, but definitely in the valley. It would be nighting up soon. There would be no hunting before tomorrow.

They came to the edge of the floodplain in the last light of day. Marika was amazed to see so much flat and open land. She wondered why no packstead stood on such favorable ground.

Only Pobuda felt inclined to explain. “It looks good, yes. Like a well-laid trap. Three miles down, the river enters a narrows flanked by granite. When the snows melt and the water rushes down, carrying logs and whatnot, those narrows block. Then the water rises. This land becomes one great seething brown flood, raging at the knees of those hills down there. Any packstead built on the plain would be drowned the first spring after it was built.”

Marika saw the water in her mind, and the image suddenly became one of angry kropek. She began to comprehend the nervousness shown by some of the huntresses.

She did not sleep well. Nor did many huntresses, including her dam. There was much coming and going between packs, plotting and planning and negotiating. Messengers crossed the river, though meth disliked swimming intensely. Packs were in place on the far bank, too, for it was not known which way the kropek would follow, and those beasts had no prejudices against water.

Dawn arrived with unexpected swiftness. Pursuant to Skiljan’s instructions, Marika placed her bedroll in a tree and memorized its location. “We will be running the herd,” her dam said.

Marika expressed her puzzlement.

“The herd leaders must be kept moving. If we let them stop, the herd stops. Then there is no cutting individuals out or getting to those we might drop with arrows. They would not let us near enough.”

The packs with which they had traveled moved out. Since first light scores of huntresses and males had been at work some distance down the plain, erecting something built of driftwood, deadwood, and even cut logs. Marika asked her dam about that.

“It is to scatter the herd. Enough for huntresses to dart in and out of the fringes, planting javelins in the shoulders of the beasts, or hacking at hamstrings.” Skiljan seemed impatient with explanations. She wanted to listen, like the others. But her duty as dam was to relay what she knew to her young.

“They are coming,” Pobuda said.

And a moment later Marika heard them, too. More, she felt them. The ground had begun to tremble beneath her feet.

The noise swelled. The earth shuddered ever more. And Marika’s excitement evaporated. Her eagerness went away, to be replaced by growing apprehension. That sound grew and grew like endless thunder...

Then she spied the herd, a stain of darkness that spanned most of the plain.

“Both sides of the river,” Pobuda observed. “Not running yet.”

“The wind is with us,” Skiljan replied. “Thank the All.”

Pobuda spied Marika’s nervousness, despite her effort to conceal it. She mocked, “Nothing to it, pup. Just dash up beside a male, leap onto his shoulders, hold on with your legs while you lift his ear, and slide a knife in behind it. Push it all the way to the brain, though. Then jump clear before he goes down.”

“Pobuda!” Skiljah snapped.

“Eh?”

“None of that. Not from anyone of my loghouse. We have nothing to prove. I want everyone able to carry meat home. Not one another.”

Pobuda frowned, but did not argue.

“Do they do that?” Marika asked her dam.

“Sometimes,” Skiljan admitted. “To show courage. Behind the ear is a good spot, though. For an arrow.” Skiljan cocked her head, sniffed the breeze. A definite, strong smell preceded the kropek. “Only place an arrow will kill one of them. Not counting a low shaft upward into the eye.”

“Why use bows, then?”

“Enough hits will slow them down. It will be stragglers mostly, that we get. The old, the lame, the stupid, the young that get confused or courageous or foolish.” She looked at Marika with meaning. “You stay outside me. Understand? Away from the herd. Use your bow if you like. Though that will be difficult while running. Most important, make plenty of noise. Feint at them when I do. It is our task to keep them running.” As an afterthought, “There are some advantages to hunting in the forests. The trees do keep them scattered.”

Skiljan had to speak loudly to be heard over the kropek. Marika kept averting her gaze from the brown line. So many of them!

The tenor of the rumble changed. The herd began moving faster. Faintly, over the roar, Marika heard the ululation of meth hunting.

“Ready,” Skiljan said. “Just after the leaders come abreast of us. And do what I told you. I will not carry you home.”

“Yes, Dam.” All those venturesome thoughts she had had back at the packstead had abandoned her. Right now she wanted nothing more than to slink off with Kublin, Zambi, and the males.

She was scared.

Pobuda gave her a knowing look.

The roar of hooves became deafening. The approaching herd looked like a surge in the surface of the earth, green becoming sudden brown. Lean, tall figures loped along the near flank, screaming, occasionally stabbing with javelins.

“Now,” Skiljan said, and dashed toward the herd.

Marika followed, wondering why she was doing such a foolish thing.

The Degnan rushed from the woods shrieking. Arrows arced in among the herd leaders, who put on more speed. Skiljan darted in, jabbed a male with her javelin. Marika made no effort to follow. At twenty feet she was as close as ever she wanted to be. The eyes of the ugly beasts held no fear. They seemed possessed of an evil, mocking intelligence. For a moment Marika feared that the kropek had plans of their own for today.

Distance fled. With speed came quick weariness. The meth who had been running the herd fell away, their hunting speed temporarily spent. They trotted while they regained their breath. The kropek seemed incapable of tiring.

There was endurance and endurance, though. Meth could move at the quick trot indefinitely, though they were capable of only a mile at hunting speed.

A male feinted toward Skiljan. Pobuda and Gerrien were there instantly, ready to slip between it and the herd if it gave them room. It moved back, ran hip to shoulder with another evil-eyed brute. Marika shuddered, imagining what would become of someone unlucky enough to fall in their path.

Another male feinted. Again huntresses darted in. Again the beast faded back.

Marika tried launching an arrow. She narrowly missed one of the huntresses. Her shaft fell with no power behind it, vanished in the boil of kropek. She decided not to try again.

Her lungs began to burn, her calves to ache. And she was growing angry with these beasts who refused to line up and die.

A third male feinted. And she thought, Come out of there, you! Come out here where I can —

It wheeled and charged her, nearly falling making so sudden a turn.

She did not stop running, but neither did she try to evade its angry, angling charge. She froze mentally, unable to think what to do.

Pobuda flung past, leaping over the kropek. She planted her javelin in its shoulder as she leapt. A second later Gerrien was on the beast’s opposite flank, planting her own javelin as the kropek staggered and tried to turn after Pobuda. It tried to turn on Gerrien, then. Barlog jabbed it in the rear. It sprang forward, ran farther from the herd.

Then it halted and swung around, right into Marika. She had no choice but to jump up, over, as a big, wide mouth filled with grinding teeth rose to greet her.

She leapt high enough. Just barely high enough. Her toes brushed its snout.

“Keep running!” Skiljan yelled.

Marika glanced back once. The kropek stood at bay, surrounded.

Did I do that? Did I bring it out? she wondered. Or was it coincidence?

So try it again. But there was no time. They were approaching the obstacles built that morning. Marika watched her dam closely.

Skiljan slowed and turned away from the herd, to give the flood room to break around the barriers.

But the herd did not swing. It drove straight ahead at full speed, into the obstacles.

How many tons of kropek flesh in that raging tide? More than could be calculated. The barriers collapsed. Kropek climbed over kropek. The air filled with squeals of anger and agony.

Beyond, scores of huntresses were in flight. They had expected the herd to break up and pass around them. Now they used their speed advantage to angle away from that unstoppable wave. Most of them made it.

Skiljan did not pick up the pace again. When the Degnan came even with the barricade, they stopped, well away from the flow. Skiljan said, “There will be many stragglers here once the main herd passes.”

Marika thought about loosing an arrow. Pobuda read her mind. “You would be wasting your shafts, pup. Save them.”

It seemed hours before the last of the herd passed.

Skiljan was right. There were many stragglers, though those kropek that had gone down early were now little more than bloody stains in the trampled earth. The pack moved in, began the slaughter.

The stragglers clumped up in a compact mass. The heavily tusked females faced outward, held the line while the quicker, more agile males awaited a chance to leap upon their tormentors.

Down the valley the herd became congested at the narrow place. It had to force its way through a storm of missiles hurled by scores of huntresses safely perched atop high rocks. Over the next few days most of the wounded kropek would be run down and finished.

Marika tried luring one forth from the group encircled at the broken barrier. She had no luck.

Her talent — if such it was, and not a curse — was terribly unreliable.

The huntresses began picking on the more volatile males among the stragglers, one at a time. Tormented sufficiently, the beast would launch a furious charge that would expose it to attack from all sides. That made for slow work, but the number of animals dragged away for cooling out and butchering increased steadily.

There was no mercy in the huntresses, and seemingly no end to the hunt. With nightfall the males built fires from the remains of the barricades. Their light reflected redly from the eyes of the kropek still besieged. None of those rushed forward now. Which made it a standoff for the time being, though missiles kept arcing in, doing some damage. Very limited damage. Striking from head on, most just bounced off.

Fires burned all along the valley. Everywhere, on both sides of the river, meth were butchering, and gorging on organ meats. Marika thought her stomach would burst.

From the end of the floodplain came the continued squeal and rumble of kropek trying to force the narrows.

Skiljan finally allowed Marika to retrieve her bedroll, then to go settle down with the other pups, where she found Kublin in a state of exhaustion so acute she was frightened. But he did not complain. In that he was becoming something more admirable than Zamberlin, who carped about everything, though nature had equipped him far better to take it.

Before Marika parted from her dam, though, Skiljan said, “Think on what you have seen today. Reflect carefully. For meth sometimes behave very much like kropek. They develop momentum in a certain direction and nothing will turn them.”

Marika reflected, but she would not understand the whole lesson for a long time.

 

Chapter Five

I

Marika was in the watchtower when the nomads returned the morning after her dam’s night raid. She got no chance to descend.

Perhaps two hundred advanced toward the packstead, coming from the direction of the Laspe packstead. They halted beyond the reach of bows, howled, brandished weapons and fetishes. Their Wise moved among them, blessing. The huntresses among them carried standards surmounted by the skulls of meth and artfs, and the tails of kirns. Kirns were huge omnivores of the Zhotak, supposed by the nomads to be holy. Their ferocity and cunning and perseverance were legend. Thus the significance of their tails.

A big young male came forward, teeth bared as he stepped over and around bodies left from the night before. He shouted, “Abandon the stead and you will be forgiven all. Resist and your pups will be eaten.”

A bold one for a male, Marika thought. He must be the rogue the Wise called the wehrlen. What other male would be so daring?

Skiljan sped an arrow. She was good, and should not have missed, yet her shaft drifted aside. A breeze, Marika supposed.

But her dam missed twice more, a thing unprecedented. No adjustment brought her nearer her mark. The nomads cheered. The mad male howled mockingly and offered his back. He stalked away slowly.

He had his answer.

Skiljan shouted, “Rogue! You dare the wrath of the All, flouting the laws of our foredams. If you truly believe yourself chosen, meet me in bloodfight.”

A murmur of horror ran around the stockade. Was Skiljan mad too? Meet a male in bloodfight? Unheard of. Unprecedented. Disgusting. The creatures were not to be taken seriously.

Marika understood instantly, though. It was a ploy to weaken the wehrlen in the sight of his followers. They would believe him a coward if he refused. His position had to be precarious, for males did not lead and packs did not unite. Marika recalled the kropek hunt. Was this something like that, the nomads joining in the face of extremity?

The threat the wehrlen posed could be disrupted with a few well-chosen words, or by the proposed duel, the outcome of which could not be in doubt. No male could stand against a huntress of Skiljan’s speed, ferocity, and skill.

The wehrlen turned, bared his teeth in mockery, bowed slightly, then walked on.

The ploy had failed. The nomads could not hear Skiljan’s challenge.

The wehrlen reached them, took a spear from one, leaned upon it. After a moment he waved a languorous paw in the direction of the packstead.

The two hundred howled and charged.

The Degnan were better prepared today. All the archers faced the rush. Poisoned shafts stormed into the horde. Scores fell before the charge reached the stockade. Skiljan had placed half the archers where the rush could not reach them till it had crossed the outer stockade. Those huntresses kept speeding arrows once close fighting had been joined.

Old females still capable of bending bows were perched atop the loghouses. The females on the stockade were disposed so that those nomads who got over would find some paths easier than others. These paths concentrated them for the older archers. Skiljan had all the captured swords up front, and those were put to deadly use.

Nomads seized places on the shelf behind the stockade. They used their ladders to span the gap to the inner stockade, scrambled across. Many were hit and fell into the gap between barriers.

The armed males and older pups crouched in shadow under the inner platform. When nomads jumped down they attacked the invaders from in back. A great many nomads died there, and those who survived that found the loghouses sealed against them. When they turned on the males and pups, the archers atop the loghouses shot them down.

It was a great slaughter. Marika’s heart hammered as she saw hope rising. They could do it again! Already over half the attackers were down. The others would flee, probably, as soon as they realized they had been set up for killing.

Hope died.

A horde of nomads came howling out of the forest from the direction of Machen Cave. They numbered several times the party which had attacked already. They were coming against the north wall, and the Degnan had concentrated at the point of assault on the east.

Marika screamed at her dam and pointed. Skiljan looked. Her face went slack. A nomad nearly got her before she recovered her equilibrium.

These new attackers surged up to the stockade, scarcely touched by arrows. They boiled around its base like maggots in an old carcass. Their ladders rose. Up they came, seized a foothold. Parties advanced along the platforms to right and left. Some spanned ladders across to the second circle. Others began chopping through the gate, seeking to penetrate the packstead by the traditional route.

That scores of them were dying under the hail of poisoned arrows seemed not to bother them at all.

There were so many...

Scores reached the interior unscathed. They hurled themselves upon the pups and males. Scores more died. Every weapon, no matter how crude, had been treated with the poison.

The old females atop the loghouses sped arrows as fast as they could bend their bows — and could do nothing to stem the endless flood. For a moment Marika recalled the kropek sweeping over the barricades in Plenthzo Valley. This was the same thing. Madness unstoppable.

Here, there, nomads tried to claw their way up the slick ice on the loghouses, to get at the old archers. At first they had no luck.

Marika whimpered. The stockade was almost bare of defenders. It would be but a matter of minutes... Terror filled her. The grauken. The cannibal. The wehrlen had promised to devour the pups. And she could do nothing from her vantage. Nothing but wait.

She saw Gerrien go down under a pile of savages, snarling till the last, her teeth sunk in an enemy throat. She watched her dam fall a moment later in identical fashion, and wailed in her grief. She wanted to jump down, to flee into the forest, but she could not. Nomads surrounded the base of the watchtower.

No one was going to escape.

She watched Zamberlin writhe out his life, screaming, on a nomad spear. She saw Solfrank die after wielding an axe as viciously as any huntress. Three nomads preceded him into the embrace of the All. She watched the old females atop the loghouses begin falling to thrown axes and spears. These nomads carried no bows, little difference though that made now.

She saw Kublin race out from under a platform, side open in a bloody wound. He was trying to reach his dam’s loghouse. Two slavering nomads pursued him.

Black emotion boiled inside Marika, hot and furious. Something took control. She saw Kublin’s pursuers through a dark fog, moving in slowed motion. For a time it was as though she could see through them, see them without their skins. And she could see drifting ghosts, like the ghosts of all her foredams, hovering over the action. She willed a lethal curse upon the hearts of Kublin’s pursuers.

They pitched forward, shrieking, losing their weapons, clawing their breasts.

Marika gaped. What? Had she done that? Could she kill with the touch?

She tried again. Nothing happened this time. Nothing at all. Whimpering, she strained to bring up that hot blackness again, to save what remained of her pack. It would not come.

The nomads began assaulting the loghouse doors. They broke through Gerrien’s. In moments the shrieks of the very old and very young filled the square. A nomad came out carrying a yearling pup, dashed its brains out against the doorpost. Others followed him, also carrying terrified pups. Broken little bodies went into a heap. More nomads poured inside. Some brought out loot. Some brought torches. They began trying to fire the other loghouses — not an easy task.

The fighting soon dwindled to a single knot of huntresses clumped near Skiljan’s door. Only two old females remained atop the roofs, still valiantly sending arrows. Nomads began to lose interest in battle. Some bore plunder out of loghouses already breached, or began squabbling over food. Others started butchering the pups taken from Gerrien’s loghouse. Some prepared a huge bonfire of captured firewood. The victory celebration began before the Degnan were all slain.

And Marika saw it all from her watchtower trap.

A nomad came up the ladder. She drove her knife into his eye. He stiffened as the poison surged through him, plunged back down. His fellows below cursed her, threw stones and spears, harmed her not at all. The wicker of the stand turned their missiles.

She looked at the wehrlen, standing alone, leaning upon his spear, smug in victory. And the blackness came up without her willing it. It came so fast she almost missed her chance to shape it. She saw him naked of flesh, saw ghosts, and, startled, willed his heart to burst. Through the darkness she saw him leap in agony — then her thrust recoiled. It turned and struck back. She tried to dodge physically, crouched, whimpered.

Whatever happened, it did her no harm. It only terrified her more. When she rose and peeped over the wicker, she saw the wehrlen still rooted, clinging to his spear for support. She had not destroyed him, but she had hurt him. Badly. Only a powerful will kept him erect.

Gamely, Marika began seeking that blackness again.

The last defenders of Skiljan’s doorway went down. Someone seized Kublin and hurled him away to fall among the countless bodies bloodying the square. He moved a little, tried to drag himself away. Marika screamed silently, willing him to lie still, to pretend he was dead. Maybe the cannibals would overlook him. He stopped moving.

The nomads began using axes on doors that would not yield to brute force. The door to Skiljan’s loghouse boomed like a great drum. As each stroke fell, Marika jumped. She wondered how soon some nomad would realize that an axe was the tool to bring her down.

The door to Skiljan’s loghouse went. Marika heard both Pohsit and Zertan shriek powerful curses. Her granddam sprang out with vigor drawn from the All knew where, slashing with claws painted with poison. She killed three before she went down herself.

Marika did not see what became of Pohsit. The tower began to creak ominously.

She sent up a prayer to the All and clutched her bloody knife. One more to go with her into the dark. Just one more.

 

II

Marika surveyed her homeland. This was what she would leave behind. To the north, forests and hills which rose in time to become the low mountains of the Zhotak. Beyond, taiga, tundra, and permanent ice. That was the direction from which winter and the grauken came.

Below, they were roasting pups already. The smell of seared meth flesh made Marika lose her breakfast. The nomads circling her tower cursed her.

Eastward lay rolling hills white with snow, looking like the bare bones of the earth. Beyond the Plenthzo Valley the hills rose higher and formed the finest otec territory.

Southward, the land descended slowly to the east branch of the Hainlin, then in the extreme distance rose again to wooded hills almost invisible because the line between white earth and pale gray cloud could not be distinguished. Marika never had traveled beyond the river. She knew the south only through stories.

The west was very like the east, except the rolling hills were mostly bare of trees and there were no higher hills looming in the far distance. In fact, the hills descended. The land continued a slow drop all the way to the meeting of rivers where the stone packfast stood so many days away.

Thought of the packfast made her recall the messengers, Grauel and Barlog. The messengers bringing help that would arrive too late.

She felt a hint of a touch.

For a moment she thought it just the tower vibrating to the pounding blows of the axes below.

Another hint.

This was the thing itself.

She spun, looked at the wehrlen. He had recovered somewhat. Now he was moving toward the packstead, using his spear like a crutch. He seemed totally oblivious to all the bodies and the racks of heads which his followers had overturned. Four fifths of this meth had been slaughtered. Did he not care?

She noted his enfeeblement and gloried in what she had done. In what the Degnan had accomplished. There would be no more nomad terror in the upper Ponath.

A touch, though. If not from him, then who?

She recalled the messengers once more, and the response she had elicited from the old meth in the packfast. How close were Grauel and Barlog and their paltry aid? Maybe she had enough of this bizarre talent to at least speed them warning about the nomad.

She opened out, and reached out, and was astonished.

They were close. Very close. That way... She looked more closely at the land. For a moment she saw only the scrubby conical trees which dotted the snowscape. Then she realized that a few of those trees were different. They stood where no trees had stood before. And they were moving toward the packstead in short bursts.

Not trees at all. Three meth in black. Meth very like the one dam had slain near Machen Cave. Their clothing was like hers, like nothing Marika had ever seen, loose, voluminous, whipping in the wind. They came toward the packstead like the advance of winter, inexorable, a tall one in the middle, one of normal height to either side.

Behind them hundreds of yards, Marika now distinguished Grauel and Barlog crouched near a true tree. The two huntresses from Gerrien’s loghouse had realized the magnitude of the disaster before them. They were too shaken to come ahead.

The axe kept slamming against the leg of the tower. They were taking long enough, Marika thought. Were they intentionally trying to torment her? Or was it just that the axe was in abominable condition?

The three black figures were two hundred yards away now, no longer making any effort to conceal their approach. A nomad spotted them, shouted, and pointed. Dozens more nomads clambered onto the platforms behind the stockade. The male chopping at the watchtower stopped for a moment.

The three dark figures halted. The one in the middle raised both paws and pointed forefingers at the palisade.

Marika saw nothing. It was nothing physical. But her mind reeled away from an impact as strong as the wehrlen’s counterattack. And nomads began screaming and falling off the stockade, clawing at their chests just the way Kublin’s attackers had.

The screaming ended. A deep silence filled the packstead. Nomads looked at nomads suddenly dead. The male below the tower dropped his axe. Mouths opened but nothing came forth.

Then an excited babble did break out. More nomads mounted the stockade.

This time all three dark meth raised their arms, and every nomad on the palisade fell, shrieking and clawing their chests.

Nomads boiled through the spiral, clambered over the stockade, all rushing the three, murder in their hearts and eyes. A handful besieged the wehrlen, who seemed to have halted to regain his breath. Marika could not guess what confused tale he heard, but did see him shudder and, as if by pure will, pull himself together.

Those nomads who chose to attack the meth in black died by the score. Not one got closer than a dozen feet.

The meth in black began circling round the stockade, toward the mouth of the spiral.

The wehrlen watched them come into view. He did something. One of the three mouthed a faint cry and dropped. The others halted. The taller did something with her fingers. The wehrlen stiffened. Marika felt his surprise. Rigid as old death, he fell slowly forward.

Nomad witnesses howled in despair. They ran. It did them no good. The fastest and last to fall covered no more than twenty yards.

The two in black knelt over the third. Marika saw the tall one’s head shake. They rose and walked the spiral into the packfast. A few dozen nomads remained inside. They scaled the stockade, trying to flee.

It was all very baffling to Marika.

The two entered the packstead’s interior. A last few nomads died before they could hurl spears. Of the scores and scores of fallen, not one showed any sort of wound.

The dark two strode to the heart of the square, stepping over but otherwise ignoring the dead. There they halted, turned slowly, surveyed the carnage. They seemed aware of Marika but indifferent to her presence in the tower. The taller said something. The shorter went to the door of Logusz’s loghouse. A moment later, inside, nomads began screaming. She moved across to Foehse’s loghouse. Screams again. She then seemed satisfied.

Marika finally shook her knotted muscles into motion. Terror had left her so shaky she nearly fell twice getting down. She grabbed the axe from the male who had been chopping the tower leg, rushed toward the place where she had seen Kublin last.

Kublin was the only one of her blood who might still be living.

She had to dig him out from under a heap of nomads. He was breathing still, and bleeding still. She held him close and wept, believing, though she had neither healer’s knowledge nor skill, that nothing could be done.

Somehow it all became concentrated in Kublin. All the grief and loss. The blackness welled within her. She saw ghosts all around her thickly, as though the spirits of the dead were reluctant to leave the place of battle. She looked inside Kublin, through Kublin, as though he were transparent. She saw the depth of his bruises and wounds. Angrily, she willed him health instead of death.

Kublin’s eyes opened momentarily. “Marika?”

“Yes, Kublin. I’m here, Kublin. Kublin, you were so brave today.”

“You were in the tower, Marika. How did you get down?”

“Help came, Kub. We won. They’re all dead. All the nomads. The messengers came back in time.” A lie. In time for what? Of all the Degnan other than the messengers themselves, only she and Kublin remained alive. And he was about to die.

Well, at least he could go into the arms of the All thinking something had been accomplished.

“Brave,” Kublin echoed. “When it was time. When it counted. It was easier than I thought, Marika. Because I didn’t have to worry.”

“Yes, Kublin. You were a hero. You were as great as any of the huntresses today.”

He rewarded her with that big winning look he got that made her love him above all her other siblings, then he relaxed. When she finally decided that he had stopped living, she wept.

Seldom, seldom did a meth female shed tears, unless in ritual. The two who wore black turned to stare at her, but neither made any move to approach her. They exchanged the occasional word or two while they watched.

The messengers came into the packstead. At last. Numb from shock, they surveyed the carnage. Grauel let out one prolonged, pained howl of torment. Barlog came to Marika, gently scratched the top of her head, as one did with infants in pain or distress. Marika wondered what had become of her hat. Why hadn’t she felt the cold nipping at her ears?

Having collected herself, Grauel joined the two meth who wore black.

 

III

They sheltered the night in Skiljan’s loghouse, which, having held the longest, had been damaged least. Marika could not get the stench of roast pup out of her nostrils. She kept shaking and hugging herself and slinking into shadows, where she closed into herself and watched ghosts bob through the loghouse walls. For a long time she was not very sane. Sometimes she saw meth who were not there and spoke with them as though they were. And then she saw one meth who might have been there, and she did not believe what she saw.

The messengers forced her to drink an infusion of chaphe, which finally pushed her down into a deep, long, dreamless sleep.

Nevertheless, in the deep hours of the night, she either wakened partially or dreamed she overheard the two in black. Grauel and Barlog and a tumble of ragged skins that might have contained a third body were scattered around one firepit. The outsiders sat by the other.

The taller said, “She is the one who touched us at Akard. Also the one who struck twice during the fighting. A strong one, well-favored by the All.”

The rag-skin pile stirred.

“But untrained,” the second outsider countered. “These ones who find themselves on their own are difficult to discipline. They never really fit in.”

This meth was very old, Marika realized. She had not noticed before. She had not looked at these intruders closely at all. This one had to be older than her granddam. Yet she remained spry enough to have made a long journey in a forced march, traveling without rest, and then had had energy left to help drive away or kill hundreds of nomads. What manner of meth was she? What sort of creatures were these meth of the packfast?

“Silth bitches,” she heard her dam murmur, as though she were still alive and crouching before the firepit, muttering about all the things she hated in her world. But at least Marika did not see her crouching there. Her mind was beginning to recover.

“We must take her back. That was, after all, the purpose of the expedition. To find the source of that touch.”

“Of course. Like it or not. Fear it or not. Khles, I have a foreboding about this one. A name comes to me again and again unbidden, and I cannot shake it. Jiana. Nothing good will come of her. She has that air of doom about her. Do you not sense it?”

The other shrugged. “Perhaps I am not sufficiently Wise. What of the others?”

“The old one is useless. And mad. But the huntresses we will take, too. While they remain in shock, unready yet to race into the wilds to avenge their pack and get themselves killed in the avenging. We never have enough help, and they have no other pack to turn to. Myself, I foresee them becoming far more useful than the pup.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps. Labor does have its value. Ho! Look there. See the little eyes glow in the firelight. She is a strong one, pushing back the chaphe sleep. Sleep, little silth. Sleep.”

Behind the two strange meth the pile of rag skins stirred once again. Almost seethed, Marika thought.

The taller outsider extended a paw toward Marika. Fingers danced. Moments later sleep came, though she fought it with all her will, terrified. And when she wakened she remembered, but could not decide if what she recalled had been dream or fact.

The Wise made little distinction anyway. So what did it matter? She would accept all that as fact, though what she had heard made no sense.

 

Chapter Six

I

Morning came. Marika awakened disoriented. Where were the noises of a loghouse beginning its day? The clatter, the chatter, the bickering were absent. The place was as still as death. Marika remembered. Remembered and began to whine.

She heard footsteps. Someone stopped behind her. She remained facing the wall. What a time to spend her first night in huntress’s territory!

A paw touched her. “Pup? Marika?”

She rolled, looked into Grauel’s face. She did not like Grauel. The huntress from Gerrien’s loghouse had no pups of her own. She was very short with others’ young. There was something indefinably wrong about her.

But this was a different Grauel, a changed Grauel, a Grauel battered by events. A Grauel shocked into gentleness and concern. “Come, Marika. Get up. It is time to eat. Time to make decisions.”

Barlog was doing the cooking. Marika was amazed.

She surveyed her home. It seemed barren without the jostle and snarl. All outsiders surrounding the firepit. How many outsiders had ever eaten here? Very few.

And a huntress cooking. Times were odd, indeed.

The food was what one might expect of a huntress who had cooked only a few times in her life, and then in the field. A simple stew. But Marika’s mouth watered anyway. She had not eaten since dawn the day before. Yet she did not gobble what Barlog handed her. She ate slowly, reluctant to get to what must follow. Yet the meal did end. Marika clasped her hands across her full stomach as Grauel said, “We three must decide what we will do now.”

Barlog nodded.

Last of the Degnan. Last of the richest pack of the upper Ponath. Some things did not have to be said. They could not wait for summer, then take new males and begin breeding back up. Especially as Grauel could not bear pups. There were no Wise to teach, no males to manage the packstead. Of food and firewood and such there was such a plentitude that that wealth was a handicap in itself.

Times were hard. If the nomads themselves did not come first, some pack left in tight straits by them would discover the wealth here and decide to plunder. Or move in. Two huntresses and a pup could not hold the palisade. Not unless the silth from the packfast stayed. And did so for years.

Marika suspected even a few days were out of the question.

Silently, she cursed the All. She stared into the embers at the bottom of the firepit, thinking of the wealth in iron and stores and furs that would be lost simply because the Degnan could not defend them.

Neighbors or nomads. There were plenty of both who would commit murder gladly now. Winter was ahowl and the grauken was loose in the world.

A few nomads had escaped the massacre yesterday. Marika did not doubt that there were others scattered about the upper Ponath. Were they gathering? Might their scouts be at Stapen Rock, watching, knowing the packstead could be taken easily once the strangers departed?

That was the worst of it. Thinking the nomads might get everything after all.

Grauel was speaking to her. She pricked up her ears. “What? I was thinking.”

“I said the sisters offered us a place in their packfast.” Loathing under strict control tautened Grauel’s voice. These meth were the silth whom Marika’s dam and granddam and Pohsit had so hated.

But why?

Grauel continued, “We have no choice if we wish to survive. Barlog agrees. Perhaps we can take new males and begin the line afresh when you have reached mating age.”

Marika shook her head slowly. “Let us not lie to ourselves, Grauel. The Degnan are dead. Never will we grow strong enough to recover this packstead from those who claim it.”

She had wanted to see the stone packfast inhabited by these meth called silth. But not at this price. “Run to the Laspe, Grauel,” she said. “Tell them. For a while, at least, let our wealth aid someone who shares our misery. They will have a better chance of holding it. And they will become indebted, so we would have a place to return one day.”

The silth, seated a short distance away, were paying no attention. Indeed, they seemed preoccupied with the male end of the loghouse. They whispered to one another, then did pay attention, as if very much interested in the huntresses’ response to Marika’s suggestion.

Grauel and Barlog were startled by the notion. It had not occurred to them, and probably could not have. Two packs sharing a stead was not unheard of, but it was rare.

Grauel nodded reluctantly. Barlog said, “She is as smart as her dam was.” She rose.

Grauel snapped at her. For a moment they argued over who would carry the message.

Marika realized that both wanted to get away from the packstead and its uncompromising reminders of disaster.

“Both of you go. That will be safer. There are nomads around still.”

The huntresses exchanged looks, then donned their coats. They were gone in moments.

For a long time the silth did nothing but sit staring into the firepit, as though trying to read something in the coals. Marika collected the eating utensils. As she cleaned them and stowed them away, the silth kept glancing at her. Occasionally, one whispered to the other. Finally, the tall one said, “It is time. She has not sensed it.” She came and got one of the bowls Marika had cleaned, filled it from the pot, carried it to the trap closing the cellar belonging to the loghouse males. She set the bowl down, opened the trap, blew aroma into the darkness below. Then she retreated, looking amused.

Marika stopped working, wondering what was happening.

A wrinkled, meatless, gray old paw appeared. Marika frowned. Not even Horvat...

A head followed the paw fearfully.

“Pohsit!” Marika said.

Pure venom smoldered in the sagan’s eyes. She snatched the bowl and started to retreat into the cellar.

“Stop,” the tall silth ordered. “Come out.”

Pohsit froze. She retreated no farther, but neither did she do as directed.

“Who is this, pup?”

“Pohsit,” Marika replied. “Sagan of this loghouse.”

“I see.” The silth’s tone said more than her words. It said that the feeling the sagan had for those of the packfast was reciprocated. “Come out of there, old fraud. Now.”

Shaking, Pohsit came up. But she stopped when her feet cleared the cellar stair. She stared at the silth in stark terror.

For an instant Marika was amused. For the first time in her young life, she saw the sagan at a genuine disadvantage. And yet, there Pohsit stood, even while shaking, with her paw making slow trips from bowl to mouth with spoonfuls of stew.

“That is the male end of the loghouse, is it not, pup?” the taller silth demanded.

“Yes,” Marika replied in a small voice. Pohsit was looking at her still, still poisonous with promise.

The sagan staggered. Her bowl and spoon slipped from her paws. Those flew to her temples. She screamed, “No! Get out of my head! You filthy witches. Get out.”

The screaming stopped. Pohsit descended like a dropped hide, folding in upon herself. And for a moment Marika gaped. That was the exact rag pile she had seen during the night when she was not sure whether or not she was dreaming.

Had Pohsit been up here then? But the silth seemed surprised by her presence. Seemed to have discovered her only recently.

No sense here...

But she had seen her dam, too, hadn’t she? And Pobuda. And many others who could not have been there because they were all dead. Or was that a dream?

Marika began to shake, afraid that she had begun to lose her grip on reality.

The alternative, that at times she was not quite firmly anchored in the river of time, she pushed out of mind the instant it occurred. That was too frightening even to contemplate.

“Just as I thought,” the taller silth said. “Terror. Pure cowardice. She hid down there thinking the savages would not look for her there.”

Hatred smoldered in the eyes that peeped out of the skin pile.

Marika sensed an opportunity to repay all the evil Pohsit had tried to do her. She had only to appeal to these meth. But Pohsit was Degnan. Crazy, malicious, poisonous, hateful, but still closer than any outsiders.

Grauel and Barlog would be pleased to learn that one of the Wise, and a sagan at that, had survived.

As though touching her thoughts, the older silth asked, “What shall we do with her, pup?” Marika now knew them for the creatures her elders had muttered against, but still did not know what silth were.

“Do? What do you mean, do?” She wished they would give names, so she could fix them more certainly in mind. But when she asked, they just evaded, saying their names were of no consequence. She got the feeling they were not prepared to trust her with their names. Which made no sense at all. The only other outsiders she had met, the wandering tradermales, insisted on giving you their names the moment they met you.

“We have looked into this one’s mind. We know it as we know our own now.” A whine escaped Pohsit. “We know how she tormented you. We know she would have claimed your life had she the chance. How would you requite such malice?”

The question truly baffled Marika. She did not want to do anything, and they must understand that. One did not demand vengeance upon the Wise. They were soon enough in the embrace of the All.

The older silth whispered, “She is too set in savage ways.” But Marika overheard.

The other shrugged. “Consider the circumstances. Might we not all forgive our enemies in a like situation?”

There was something going on that Marika could not grasp. She was not sure if that was because she was yet too young to understand, or because these silth were too alien to comprehend.

She had been convinced that Pohsit was mad for at least a year. Now the sagan delivered final proof.

Pohsit hurled herself out of the rag pile at Marika. An iron knife flashed, its brightness dulled by traceries of Bhlase’s poison. Marika made a feeble squealing sound and tried to crawl out of the way. Her effort was ineffective.

But Pohsit did not strike. She continued forward, bent at the waist, upper body way ahead of her feet. Her legs did not work right. Marika was reminded of a marionette one of the tradermales used to demonstrate at the night fire after the day’s business was complete. The sagan had that same goofy, flailing gait.

It carried her the length of the loghouse and into the wall a few feet to one side of the doorway.

Marika watched the old meth rise slowly, a whimper sliding between her teeth. She faced around and met the cold stares of the silth, thinking of trying again. In a moment she put the thought out of mind.

Pohsit’s behavior made no more sense than ever.

“What shall we do with her, pup?”

Still Marika would offer the sagan no harm. She shook her head. “Nothing... I do not understand her. I do not hate her. Yet she hates me.”

“That is the way of the false when faced with the true. You know you will not be safe while she lives.”

Fear animated Pohsit now, and Marika suddenly knew the silth were right: she had hidden in the male fane out of cowardice. “Pohsit. Pohsit. What do you fear? You are so old death must be a close friend.”

A spark of hatred for a moment glimmered through Pohsit’s terror. But she did and said nothing more. Marika turned her back. “Let her do what she will. It is all the same to me.”

The silth began ignoring Pohsit as studiously as did Marika. After a time the sagan quietly donned a coat — someone else’s, way too big for her — and slipped out of the loghouse. Marika saw the tall silth nod slightly to the older.

She did not understand that till much later.

 

II

The silth questioned Marika about her talent. How had she grown aware that she was unusual? How had her talent manifested itself? They seemed convinced it would have caused her grave troubles had she let it become known.

“Your dam should have brought you to the packfast years ago. You and your littermates. As all pups are to be brought. It is the law.”

“I know little about the packfast and the law,” Marika replied. “Except that not many meth pay attention to either here in the upper Ponath. I have heard many jests made at the expense of that law. And I have heard our teacher, Saettle, say we came into the Ponath to escape the law.”

“No doubt.” The taller silth was extremely interested in Machen Cave. She kept returning to that. She asked Marika to be more specific about her experiences. Marika related each in as much detail as she could recall.

“You seem a little uncertain about something. As though there is more that you are afraid to tell.”

“There is more,” Marika admitted. “I just do not know if you will believe me.”

“You might be surprised, pup. We have seen things your packmates would deny can exist.” This was the older silth. Marika was not entirely comfortable with that one. In her way, she had a feel very like Pohsit. And she evidently had the power to be as nasty as Pohsit wished she could be.

“The last time I was there I really was not there. If you see what I mean.”

The tall silth said, “We do not see. Why do you not just tell it?”

“The other night. When dam and the others went out to raid the nomads. They were up at Machen Cave with a big bonfire and all their Wise doing some kind of ceremony. Anyway, I followed dam through the touch. It was stronger than ever. I could see and hear everything she saw and heard.” She choked on her words, eyed the silth oddly.

“You have remembered something.”

“Yes. There was one of your kind there. With the nomads...”

Both silth rose suddenly. The tall one began pacing. The other hovered over Marika, staring down intently.

“Did I say something wrong? Did I offend?”

“Not at all,” the tall one said. “We were startled and distressed. A sister like ourselves, you say? Tell us more.”

“There is little to tell. Dam and Gerrien attacked the nomads. Most of them panicked and fled. But suddenly this one meth, dressed like you almost, appeared out of nowhere, and —”

“Literally?”

“Excuse me?”

“She materialized? In fact? She did not just step from behind a tree or something?”

“No. I do not think so. She just appeared right in front of dam and Gerrien. She pointed something at them, then cursed it. It seemed like it was supposed to do something and did not. Then she tried to club them with it. Dam and Gerrien killed her. It was a strange weapon. All of metal.”

The silth exchanged glances. “All of metal, eh? Where is this Machen Cave? I think we would be very interested in this metal club.”

“Machen Cave is north. Several hours. But you do not have to go there. Dam brought the club home.”

Excitement sparked between the silth. “Indeed? Where is it now, then?”

“I will have to find it. Dam put it away somewhere. She said she would trade the metal to the tradermales. Or maybe we could fashion tools from it.”

“Find it, please.”

While she talked Marika had begun setting the inside of the loghouse in order. When she kept paws and mouth busy, she did not have to think about what lay outside the loghouse. She continued distracting herself by searching for Skiljan’s trophy. “Here it is.”

The tall meth took it. Both sat down, facing one another, the metal club between them. They passed it back and forth, examined it minutely, even argued over a few small writing characters stamped into one side. They did so, though, in a language Marika did not understand. By the cautious way they handled the thing, Marika decided it was a dangerous something they had seen but never before touched.

“It is very important that you recall every detail about this meth you saw. The one who carried this club. It is certain she was our enemy. If we can identify her pack, by her clothing, say, we will be better equipped to protect our own. There should be no silth with the nomads.”

“There should be no wehrlen either,” said the older silth. “A wehrlen come out of nowhere, with skills as advanced as our own, or nearly so. This is an impossibility.”

The taller meth was thoughtful a moment. “That is true.” She looked at Marika intently. “Where does this Machen Cave lie again?” And Marika felt something brush her mind, a touch far lighter than that she had experienced the night the far silth had responded to her probing of the packfast. “Ah. So. Yes. Sister, I am going to go there after all. To see if the bodies remain. You learn what you can from the wehrlen.”

The older silth nodded. She went out of the loghouse immediately.

The other dallied a moment, looking at Marika, saying nothing. Finally, she too departed, scratching Marika behind the ear lightly as she went. “It will all work out, pup. It will all work out.”

Marika did not respond. She sat down and stared into the coals in the firepit. But she found no clues there.

 

III

She straightened the inside of the loghouse a bit more, moving in a daze. When she could find nothing more to preoccupy her there, she donned her coat. She had to go outside sometime and face the truth. No sense putting it off any longer.

It was every bit as terrible as she remembered, and worse. The carrion eaters had gathered. It would be a fat winter for them.

Though it was pointless, she began the thankless task of cleaning the packstead. One by one, straining her small frame to its limits, she dragged the frozen corpses of her packmates into the lean-to sheds. They would be safe from the carrion eaters there. For a time.

Near the doorway to Gerrien’s loghouse she came on something that made her stop, stand as still as death for a long time.

Pohsit. Dead. Sprawled, one arm outstretched as if beseeching the loghouse, the other at her heart, her paw a claw. When Marika finally tore her gaze away she saw the elder silth in the mouth of the stockade spiral, watching.

Neither said a word.

Marika bent and caught hold of Pohsit’s arm and dragged her into a lean-to with the others. Maybe, just a little, she had begun to understand what “silth” meant, and why her elders cursed and feared them.

Sometimes she could not reach her packmates because they were buried beneath dead nomads. Those she dragged around the spiral to the field outside, where she left them to the mercy of the carrion eaters. The wehrlen, she noted, had been both moved and stripped. The elder silth had searched him thoroughly.

There was no end to the gruesome task. So many bodies... When her muscles began to protest, she rested by gathering fallen weapons instead, moving them near the doorway of her dam’s loghouse, laying them out neatly by type, as if for inventory. She had tried to strip the better furs from the dead, too, but that had proven too difficult. The bodies would have to be thawed first.

Always the carrion eaters surrounded her. They would not learn to remain outside the stockade. They flapped away, squawking, only when she came within kicking distance. She sealed her ears to their bickering over tidbits. Listening might have driven her mad.

She was more than a little mad anyway. She drove herself mercilessly, carrying out a task without point.

After a time the taller silth returned, loping gracefully and easily upon the dirtied snow. She carried a folded garment similar to her own. She joined the other silth, and the two watched Marika, neither speaking, interfering, nor offering to help. They seemed to understand that an exorcism was in progress. Marika ignored them and went on. And went on. And went on till her muscles cried out in torment, till fatigue threatened to overwhelm her. And still she went on.

She passed near the silth often, pretending they did not exist, yet sometimes she could not help overhearing the few words they did exchange. Mostly, they talked about her. The older was becoming concerned. She heard herself called smart, stubborn, and definitely a little insane.

She wondered what the tall silth had learned around Machen Cave. They did not discuss that. But she was not interested enough to ask.

The sun rode across the sky, pursued by the specks of several lesser moons. Marika grew concerned about Grauel and Barlog. They had been gone long enough to reach the Laspe packstead and return. Had they fallen foul of nomad survivors? Finally, she scaled the watchtower, which threatened to topple off its savaged legs. She barely had the energy to complete the climb. She saw nothing when she did and looked toward the neighboring packstead.

She dug around inside herself, seeking her ability to touch, with increasing desperation. It just was not there! She had to reach out and make sure Grauel and Barlog were all right! The All could not claim them too, leaving her alone with these weird silth! But it was hopeless. Either she had lost the ability or it had gone dormant on her in her shock and fatigue.

She told herself there was no point worrying. That worry would do no good, would change nothing. But she worried. She stood there studying the countryside, unconsciously resting, till the wind penetrated her furs and her muscles began to stiffen, then she climbed down and lost herself in labor again.

She did not know, consciously, what she was doing, but she was avoiding grief, because it was a grief too great to bear. Even toughened Grauel and Barlog had needed something to occupy them, to allow some of the pressure to leak off unnoted, to give some meaning to having survived. How much more difficult for a pup not yet taught to keep emotion under tight control.

The silth understood grief. They stayed out of her way, and did nothing to discourage her from working herself into an exhausted stupor.

The shadows were long and the carrion eaters almost too overfed to fly. Marika had dragged most all of her packmates into the lean-tos. Suddenly she realized that she had not found Kublin. Zambi had been there, right where she remembered him falling, but not Kub. Kub should have been one of the first she reached, because she had left him atop one of the heaps of dead. Hadn’t she?

Had she dragged him away and not noticed? Or had she forgotten? The more she tried to remember, the more she became confused. She became locked into a lack of movement, in complete indecision, just standing in the square while a rising wind muttered and moaned about her.

The sky above threatened new snow. A few random flakes danced around, dashed in to melt upon her nose or to sting her eyeballs. The several days’ break in winter’s fury would end soon. The white would come and mask death till spring pulled the shroud aside.

One of the silth came and led her into Skiljan’s loghouse, settled her near a freshened fire. The other was building up the fire at the male end of the loghouse and setting out pots and utensils in preparation for a meal far too large for three. Neither spoke.

Grauel and Barlog arrived with the darkness, leading the Laspe survivors. They numbered just a few over three score, and all fit comfortably into the one loghouse. The silth dished up stew silently, watched while the Laspe ate greedily. After a time they prepared an infusion of chaphe and insisted Marika drink it. As she faded away, barely aware of them wrapping her in furs, she murmured, “But I wanted to hear about what you found at Machen Cave.”

“Later, little silth. Later. Rest your heart now. Rest your heart.”

She wakened once in the deep hours. The fire crackled nearby, sending shadows dancing. The taller silth sat beside the firepit, motionless as stone except when dropping another piece of wood into the flames. Her eyes glowed in the firelight as she stared at Marika.

A touch, gentle as a caress. Startled, Marika recoiled.

Easy, little one. There is nothing to fear. Go back to sleep.

Something enwrapped her in warmth, comfort, reassurance. She fell asleep immediately.

Morning found the packstead blanketed with six inches of new snow. The remaining bodies in the square had become vague lumps seen through slowly falling snowflakes. The air was almost still, the new flakes large, and the morning deceptively warm. It seemed one could go out and run without a coat. Grauel and Barlog rose early and went out to take up where Marika had left off. A few of the Laspe survivors joined them. There was little talk. The snowfall continued, lazy but accumulating quickly. It was a very wet snow.

Noon came. The silth made everyone come inside and eat a huge meal. Marika watched the Laspe Wise cringe away from the two in black, and wondered why. But she did not ask. She did not care enough about anything to ask questions just then.

Marika and Grauel were first to go back outside. Almost the instant they stepped into the snowfall the huntress snapped Marika’s collar and yanked her down, clapped a paw over her mouth before she could speak. Holding Marika, she pointed.

Vague figures moved through the snowfall around Gerrien’s loghouse. Nomads! And they could not be ignorant of the fact that the packstead was inhabited still, for Skiljan’s loghouse was putting out plenty of smoke.

Marika wriggled her way back through the doorway. Grauel slid inside behind her. Once she was certain she would not be heard outside, the huntress announced, “We have company outside. Nomads. I would guess only a few, trying to steal whatever they can under cover of the snow.”

The silth laid down their ladles and bowls, closed their eyes. In a moment the taller nodded and said, “There are a dozen of them. Quietly taking food.”

Marika listened no more. Barlog had snatched up a bow and was headed for the door, not bothering to don a coat. Marika scampered after her, tried to restrain her. She failed, and in an instant was out in the snow again, still trying to hold the huntress back.

Her judgment was better than Barlog’s. As the huntress pushed outside, an arrow ripped past her ear and buried itself in the loghouse wall.

Barlog drew her own arrow to her ear, let fly at a shadow as another arrow streaked out of the falling snow. The latter missed. Barlog’s brought a yip of pain.

The door shoved against Marika’s back. Grauel pushed outside, cursing Barlog for her folly. She readied her own bow, crouched, sought a target.

Marika flopped onto her belly. Barlog, too, crouched. Arrows whipped overhead, stuck in or bounced off the loghouse. They heard confused shouting in dialect as the nomads debated the advisability of flight. A shaft from Grauel’s bow found a shadow. That settled the matter for the nomads. They hefted their wounded and ran. They were not about to stay in a place so well known to death.

Where were the silth? Marika wondered. Why didn’t they do something?

Grauel and Barlog made fierce noises and chased after the nomads — making sure they did not catch up. Marika followed, feeling foolish as she yipped around the spiral.

The nomads vanished in the snowfall. Grauel and Barlog showed no inclination to pursue them through that, where an ambush could so easily be laid. Grauel held Marika back. “Enough, pup. They are gone.”

During all the excitement Marika never felt a hint of touch. The silth had done nothing.

She challenged them about it the moment she returned to the loghouse.

The taller seemed amused. “One must think beyond the moment if one is to be silth, little one. Go reflect on why it might be useful to allow some raiders to escape.”

Marika did as she was told, sullenly. After her nerves settled, she began to see that it might indeed be beneficial if word spread that the Degnan packstead was defended still. Beneficial to the remaining Laspe anyway.

She began to entertain second thoughts about emigrating to the silth packfast.

That afternoon the silth gave her another infusion of chaphe to drink. They made Grauel and Barlog drink of it and rest, too. And when night fell and Biter rose to scatter the world with her silvery rays, the two females said, “It is time to leave.”

Between them, Marika, Grauel, and Barlog found a hundred reasons for delaying. The two females in black might have been stone, for all they were moved. They brought forth travel packs which they had assembled while the three Degnan slept. “You will take these with you.”

Marika, too stupefied to argue much, went through hers. It contained food, extra clothing, and a few items that might come in handy during the trek. She found a few personal possessions also, gifts from Kublin, Skiljan, and her granddam that had meant much to her once and might again after time banished the pain. She eyed the silth suspiciously. How had they known?

Resigned, Grauel and Barlog began shrugging into the coats. Marika pulled on her otec boots, the best she owned. No sense leaving them for Laspe scavengers.

A thought hit her. “Grauel. Our books. We cannot leave our books.”

Grauel exchanged startled glances with Barlog. Barlog nodded. Both huntresses settled down with stubborn expressions upon their faces.

“Books are heavy, pup,” the taller silth said. “You will tire of carrying them soon. Then what? Cast them into the river? Better they stay where they will be appreciated and used.”

“They are the treasure of the Degnan,” Marika insisted, answering the silth but speaking to the huntresses. “We have to take the Chronicle. If we lose the Chronicle, then we really are dead.”

Grauel and Barlog agreed with a fervor that startled the silth.

Few wilderness packs had the sense of place in time and history that had marked the Degnan. Few had the Degnan respect for heritage. Many had no more notion of their past than the stories of their oldest Wise, who erroneously told revised versions of tales passed down by their own granddams.

Grauel and Barlog were embarrassed. It shamed them that they had not thought of the Chronicle themselves. So long as it existed and was kept, the Degnan would exist somewhere. They became immovably stubborn. The silth could not intimidate them into motion.

“Very well,” the taller said, ignoring the angry mutter of her companion. “Gather your books. But hurry. We are wasting moonlight. The sky may not stay clear long. The north spawns storms in litters.”

The two huntresses took torches and left Skiljan’s loghouse, made rounds of all the other five. They collected every book of the pack that had not been destroyed. Marika brought out the six from the place where Saettle had kept those of Skiljan’s loghouse. When all were gathered, there were ten.

“They are right,” she admitted reluctantly. “They are heavy.”

They were big, hand-inscribed tomes with massive wood and leather boards and bindings. Some weighed as much as fifteen pounds.

Marika set the three volumes of the Chronicle aside, looked to the huntresses for confirmation. Grauel said, “I could carry two.”

Barlog nodded. “I will carry two also.”

That made four. Marika said, “I think I could carry two, if they were light ones.” She pushed the massive Chronicle volumes toward the huntresses. Grauel took two, Barlog the other. No more than two would be lost if one of them did not reach the packfast.

Three books had to be selected from the remaining seven. Marika asked the huntresses, “Which do you think will be the most useful?”

Grauel thought for a moment. “I do not know. I am not bookish.”

“Nor am I,” Barlog said. “I hunt. We will have little real use for them. We just want to save what we can.”

Marika exposed her teeth in an expression of exasperation.

“You choose,” Grauel said. “You are the studious one.”

Marika’s exasperation became more marked. A decision of her own, a major one, as though she were an adult already. She was not prepared mentally.

On first impulse she was tempted to select those that had belonged to her own loghouse. But Barlog reminded her that Gerrien’s loghouse had possessed a book on agriculture that, once its precepts had been accepted, had improved the pack’s yields, reducing the labor of survival.

One of the silth said, “You will have no need of a book about farming. You will not be working in the fields. Leave it for those who will have more need.”

So. A choice made.

Marika dithered after rejecting only one more book, a collection of old stories read for the pleasure of small pups. There would be no need of that where they were going.

The older silth came around the fire, arrayed the books before Marika after the manner of terrac fortune plaques, which the sagans so often consulted. “Close your eyes, Marika. Empty your mind. Let the All come in and touch you. Then you reach out and touch books. Those shall be the ones you take.”

Grauel grumbled, “That is sheer chance.”

Barlog added, “Witch’s ways,” and looked very upset. Just the way the Wise did whenever talk turned to the silth.

They were afraid. Finally, Marika began to realize what lay at the root of all their attitudes toward the silth. Sheer terror.

She did exactly as she was told. Moments later her paw seemed to move of its own accord. She felt leather under her fingers, could not recall which book lay where.

“No,” said the older silth. “Keep your eyes closed.”

Grauel grumbled something to Barlog.

“You two,” the old silth said. “Pack the books as she chooses them. Place the others in the place where books are stored.”

Marika’s paw jerked to another book. For a moment it seemed something had hold of her wrist. And on the level of the touch, she sensed something with that darkshadow presence she associated with the things she called ghosts.

Again, and done.

The old silth spoke. “Open your eyes, pup. Get your coat. It is time to travel.”

Unquestioning, Marika did as she was told. Coat on, she raised her pack and snugged it upon her shoulders the way Pobuda had shown her, finally, coming back from the hunt in Plenthzo Valley. She felt uncomfortable under the unaccustomed weight. Recalling the march to and from the hunt, and the deep, wet snow, she knew she would become far more uncomfortable before she reached the silth packfast.

Maybe she would end up discarding the books.

Maybe the silth had been trying to do her a favor, trying to talk her out of taking the books.

There were no farewells from or for the Laspe, who watched preparations for departure with increasing relief. As they stepped to the windskins, though, Marika heard the Laspe Wise begin a prayer to the All. It wished them a safe journey.

It was something.

As she trudged around the spiral of the stockade, the new snow dragging at her boots, Marika asked the silth ahead, “Why are we leaving now? Could we not travel just as safely in the daytime?”

“We are silth, pup. We travel at night.”

The other, from behind Marika, said, “The night is our own. We are the daughters of the night and come and go as we will.”

Marika shivered in a cold that had nothing to do with the wind off the Zhotak.

And around her, in the light of many moons, all the world glimmered black and bone.