The lesser chiefs settled down in a group a little apart, sitting on the furs and talking quietly among themselves in their own tongue. Rudy overheard a drift of it now and then, a spare, quiet murmur, modulated like the sigh of the wind, half-augmented by signs and marked by subtle changes of inflection. Only Hoofprint of the Wind came to sit with him and Ingold, bringing meat and mush and a bottle of some kind of drink that had a nasty sweetish backtaste and an insidious alcoholic content.
'Now,' the chief said, when they had eaten and the semidarkness of the shelter was deepening with the coming of evening outside. 'You wise men, who read all the papers of the mud diggers beyond the mountains, what is this ghost that is more terrible than the Eaters in the Night, wise man?'
'More terrible?' Ingold asked softly. Rudy heard in the mellow, grainy voice not
only apprehension but overwhelming curiosity. Pointed to its lair, Rudy thought, he'd investigate it or die.
'So must it be.'
'Why? Have you seen it?'
There was a movement of denial and the glint of silver on a thick, gleaming braid.
'Then how do you know that it is more terrible?'
The Raider shrugged, a slight gesture reminiscent of the Icefalcon's curt movements. They flee before it,' he said. 'All the holes in the ground from which they rose up have they deserted and they come no more to this part of the plain. If this thing has eaten up the Eaters, now that they are gone, will it not destroy us also? When the chosen prey of a thing dies out, will it not turn to other? We know nothing of this thing and never have we seen it. Yet why have the Eaters gone? From what would such creatures flee? Have you heard the name of this thing, Desert Walker, in all your lore?'
'No,' Ingold said. 'I have heard nothing of this. When did they depart, the Eaters in the Night?'
Hoofprint of the Wind paused in thought, counting backward in time. Outside, the wind grew to a shrill-voiced violence with the dropping of the ground temperature; a few inches above their heads, the hide roof of the shelter rattled angrily on its moorings.
'It was the time of the first quarter moon of autumn,'the tall barbarian said finally, and Rudy, gifted with the dark-sight of a mage, saw Ingold look up suddenly, a strange eagerness illuminating his lined face. 'Yes,' the chieftain went on. They rose in the last full moon of the failing summer, far away in the north, and hunted across the lands of us, the Stcharnyii, the Chasers of the Mammoth, the People of the Plains. And we moved south, the Twisted Hills People, the White Lakes People, the Lava Hills People, and all the others of the Stcharnyii. We have hunted the deserts, picking little bugs from the ground as the dooic do. And now the Eaters in the Night have gone away and rise no more from their holes. But what has driven them forth, Desert Walker? What is this ghost that they fear? For now it has come here and driven the Eaters forth out of their holes, even in the desert. We have camped the night beside such a hole, and they came not in the night. Now what shall we do if this thing will choose to hunt us!'
Ingold sat quietly for a time, as if he had turned to stone. But Rudy could feel the tension in him, like a current of electricity, and could hear it when he spoke, under the deep, scratchy calm of his voice. 'When the deer depart, the lion does not feed on the grasses on which they fed,' he said softly. 'Nor does the hrigg, the horrible bird, eat the bugs and lizards that are the prey of its prey. It may be that humankind has nothing to fear from this ghost. But tell me. Hoof-print of the Wind, where is this hole where you spent so calm and dreamless a night?'
'From here,' the chieftain of the Raiders said, 'we could be there tomorrow, riding swift horses.' His amber eyes gleamed a little, like a beast's in the dark.
Beside him, Ingold asked casually, 'And have you not swift horses?'
Chapter 10
In spite of his dashing attempt at Errolflynnery, Rudy had never been on a horse before his arrival in this universe. On the road down from Karst he'd ridden exactly once, when he'd gone with a patrol of the Guards to investigate a farmhouse burned out by the White Raiders. The memory of what he'd found there still turned him sick. But, raised as he had been on Maverick and Paladin, he had been under the impression that there was nothing much to leaping aboard a horse and thundering away into the sunset. He had recently found out he was wrong.
The horses of the White Raiders were taller and longer-limbed than those bred in the Realm of Darwath and, from foraging on the scant saltbush and wiregrass of the desert, they were narrow-built and of prominent vertebrae. They were also skittish and half-wild, and Rudy's humiliation was complete when, in the iron darkness before the freezing desert dawn, he got chucked unceremoniously off the mildest old mare of the herd, the one Hoofprint of the Wind had chosen for him deliberately on account of her gentleness. He looked up from the dirt in bitter envy at Ingold, who was sitting a fire-snorting buckskin stallion like a patriarch of the Cossacks.
'Were you ever in the cavalry, by any chance?' he asked, as several of the Raiders went to catch the mare, their soundless laughter almost palpable in the leaden gloom. 'In a manner of speaking,' the wizard replied cryptically. His breath smoked faintly in the starlight; he held the single rawhide rein in one mittened hand, the other hand resting relaxedly on his thigh.
Rudy remembered hearing somewhere - from Gil? the rumour about Ingold's having been in his youth a slave in the Alketch and he also remembered how the Alketch cavalry trained. Being chained to a practice post and having the local
hotshots try sabre charges at him wouldn't improve his riding much; but, if the story were true, it would sure as hel! account for the old man's iron nerves. He muttered under his breath. 'It figures.'
The Raiders returned, solemn-faced with inward amusement, leading the mild and gentle mare.
They were riding north before dawn and continued throughout the day. The clouds that had broken the previous afternoon regathered, and the day grew colder instead of warmer as the small band of horsemen galloped north beneath a pale and heatless sky. At midday their breath was visible smoke, and the backs of the horses were steaming. Patchy snow covered the red sands and grew thicker as they proceeded north. Here and there Rudy saw tracks unfamiliar to his experience, and Ingold told him they were the sign of creatures native to the far north. But deeper and more frightening than the cold was the silence that covered the land. Nothing seemed to move or live in these wastes of sand and snow. At a casual look, even the winds that whirled like dust-devils across them appeared to be gone. When the riders stopped to rest or to change horses from the small cavvy of spares they had brought, Hoofprint of the Wind prowled restlessly on the edges of the group, talking softly with the dozen or so of his warriors who accompanied them or listening across the plains for some sound Rudy could not hear. The warriors who had come with them were silent, edgy as animals before summer lightning, keeping close together in the endless expanses of the snowy waste.
There,' the chieftain whispered, pointing to where the mottled red and white of the land seemed to slope upward to a far and hazy horizon. 'There it lies.'
Rudy shaded his eyes against the distance. He could make out a flat, dark gleam, like a sunken lake of oil. Though he wore a coat of buffalohide that the Raiders had given him, he felt suddenly cold.