"Hunt," I said to Ubar of the Skies. We moved quietly, a stroke at a time, through the sunlit vapor of the cloud.
Then, too, within the cloud, I saw the other riders below me. They had kept together. They were wiser than he others. Then I could not see them in the cloud.
"Hunt," I whispered to Ubar of the Skies.
Ubar of the Skies, given his rein, began to circle, every sense in the great body tense and alert. I fitted an arrow to the string of my bow.
Sometimes it seemed almost as though we were motionless, floating, or arrested in time and space, and that it was the moist, nebulous substance of the cloud that flowed past us, almost as though we were immersed in a river of fog.
Then I saw shapes before us. Ubar of the Skies was approaching from behnd and on the right. Most men are righthanded. It is more difficult, thustly, for them to turn and fire over their right shoulder. Ubar of the Skies was a trained tarn of war.
The arrow, fired from not more than fifteen feet away, entered the body of the rider on the right below the left shoulder blade and almost at the same instant Ubar of the Skies, screaming, with those hooklike, terrible talons tore the body of the rider on the left from the girth rope. I seized the reins of the tarn whose rider I had struck with the arrow. I lowered my head, avoiding the wing. Then the wing, for a moment, was arrested, caught against the Ubar of the Skies, I jerked free, from the front, where it protruded, the arrow, drawing it through the body. I did not want visible evidence of how the rider had met his end. The tarn freed its wing and I was almost struck from the back of Ubar of the Skies. The other rider was screaming, locked in talons below me. I returned the bloody arrow to the quiver. As I could I drew the tarn whos reins I held beside us, leaning forward on the back of Ubar of the Skies. Such reins are not made for leading and the stroke of the wings, so close to my bird, was irregualr, uneven and fantic. Then I cut the girth rope on the tarn, when we were over the Kinyanpi below, and let the body slide from its back. With little regret I released the tarn. It sped away.
The body would seem to have fallen from the sky, from the clouds, myseriously, inexplicably, like a meteor amonst them, penetrating their formation, thence descending to its encounter with the grasslands below.
I hovered high in the clouds, over where the Kinyanpi circled below.
I waited a suitable interval.
The man was screaming beneath me.
I recalled a child, slain and mutilated in a summer camp. "Teach me to kill," had said Cuwignaka.
"Release," I said to Ubar of the Skies.
The man, gesticulating, flailing, screaming, the sound rapidly fading, sank away from me, drawn by gravity, through the air.
I waited another suitable interval and then I, again, took Ubar of the Skies downward. Again I hovered among terrified Kinyanpi, my amrs folded. Let them consider what medicine such a fow might possess.
I then, regally, imeriously, pointed to the chieftain of the Kinyanpi, he most pominent among them, he next to the bearer of the feathered staff, the battle staff.
He shook his head, wildly. I then, with a sweeping gesture, pointed to the east, that direction from which they had come. Wildly he turned his tarn and, crying out, followed by his men, fled.
"Quickly!" I cried to Cuwignaka, Canka, Hci and the others. "Back to Council Rock!"
Soldiers ad established a hold on the eastern ledges of Council Rock, to which they had been climbing, those ledges opposite those above the trail, up which, slowly, medicine drums beating, medicine men dancing about the beasts, the porcession of Yellow Knives, a few minutes ago, had begun its climb. Behind the soldiers who attained the ledge other soldiers, roped together, clambered upward. The eastern face of Council Rock seemed covered with men and ropes.
Then tarns, screaming, talons racking, wings beating, hurtled among the startled soldiers on the ledge, seizing and tearing at them, blasts of wind even from the wings forcing some back over the edge. The defenders leaped foward. We landed our tarns among a litter of bodies, red and white, on the ledge.
I looked down, at the ropes men, not yet to the top. "Let those with tarns, who lost women and children at the summer camp, attend to these," I said.
In a moment tarns had swept again from the ledge and then, seizing ropes and men in talons, at the very rock face itself, dragged and dangling, screaming men from teh sheer surface; ropes and men, tangled, were pulled away from the surface; ropes and men, torn loose from the hand and footholds, unsupported, sped twisting and turning to the rocks below.
I raced across the top of Council Rock, men behind me. The Yellow Knives, on the western side of Council Rock, prevented by the mountain from knowing what had occured in the air to the east, and on the eastern faces of the rock, singing their medicine, their hearing throbbing with the beat of drums, had not disisted in their porcession to the summit; they had continued to ascent the trail.
"You are done!" cried Iwoso. "You are finished!" Roped to the post she was, she, too, was ignorant of the developments to the east.
Yellow Knives were not twenty-five feet below me, on the trail. In their lead surrounded by medicine men, beating on drums and dancing, were Sardak and Kog, and five others of the Kurii. I also saw, prominent among the Yellow Knives, Alfred, with soldiers, and a Yellow Knife I recognized as the third of the war chiefs who had been at the summer camp. He had not taken part, as far as I knew, in the earlier actions. It was his intention, however, I gathered, to participate in the anticipated resolution of the siege, in his forces' climactic victory.
Before resistance had crumbled at the appearance of the Kurii.
Even now the barricade at the summit was deserted.
Some fifty to seventy feet from the barricade the procession stopped.
The drums stopped. The medicine men stopped dancing. They drew back.
Kog and Sardak came forward, followed by the others.
The barricade was no longer empty. Atop it, on the logs and stakes, the wind moving in its fur, stood a gigantic Kur.
Yellow Knives crowded back against one another, uneasily. They looked to Kog and Sardak, but these beasts, standing as though stunned, or electrified, on the stony trial, were oblivious of them.
The Kur on the barricade distended its nostrils, drinking scent.
Sarkad stepped forward. He reared upright, increasing his scanning range. He moved his tentaclelike fingers on his chest, which gesture, I think, is a displacement activity. Some claim it has the function of cleaning the claws.
The ears of the beast on the barricade, one half torn away, flattened themselves against the side of the head.
Sardak's ears, too, lay back.
I saw that the claws of the rear appendages, or feet, of the monster on the barricade, had emerged. So, too, I noted, had those of Sardak.
The beasts did not speak to one another. Words were not necessary.
Swiftly, moving with incredible grace and lightness for its bulk, the beast on the barricade descended to the trail.
Sardak, the two rings of reddish alloy on his left wrist, advanced to meet it.
They stopped, some ten feet from one another, alone facing one another on the trail, between the barricade and the other beasts and Yellow Knives.
They then began, keeping very low, on all fours, to circle one another.
Occasionally one would reach out, or snarl, or make a sudden movement, but not charging, to see the response of the other. Fangs were bared.
The hair on the back of my neck rose. Was it like this, I wondered, in the ancient days of the Kurii, long before the steel worlds, long before, even, the development of their technology. Is it like this, I wondered, even today, in the steel ships, in the "killings."