Marika downed another long draft. Her limbs were trembling. She knew risking the ghost realm in her state was not wise. But it was necessary. It seemed to be the choice between grave risk and certain death. Also, there was something she had to do ...
"Stay with me this time, Grauel. I don't know you could, but if something seems bad wrong, try to bring me back."
"All right."
Marika lay back and closed her eyes. She slipped through her loophole. A glance upward showed her the giant ghost she had used before still hovering over the packfast. She snatched at it, seized it, brought it down amid the ruins of the broken wall.
She spied Gorry almost immediately, surrounded by scores of nomad bodies, exulting in her killing. Gorry, whom she hated above all else in her world. Gorry, who was totally engrossed in her work. Gorry, who was wounded and likely to be struck down by some nomad missile at any moment.
That could not be. No nomad would steal the pleasure of that death.
It was time.
Marika reached, found the point at the base of Gorry's brain, struck quickly but lightly, paralyzing not only the old silth's body but her talent. She held Gorry there for a long moment, letting the terror build.
It is time, Gorry. And, Good-bye, Gorry.
She left the paralyzed silth for the nomads. Their imaginations were far more gruesome than hers. She hoped Gorry suffered a long wait in impotent terror.
She hacked, slashed, battered, left a hundred nomads twisted and torn. Then she could stay out no longer. Blackness hovered at the edges of her perception. If she did not get out of the ghost realm soon, she never would.
She slipped into her own present and fell into a sleep of total exhaustion. Her final thought was that she needed food if she were to recover. She had pressed too hard, taken herself too far.
Self-mockery echoed through her fading consciousness. This was the last sleep from which she would never return.
She tried to beg the All to spare her awhile longer. She had one mission yet to perform before she departed the world. The Degnan dead remained unMourned.
III
To Marika's amazement, she wakened. The hammer of tradermale weapons wakened her. She opened her eyes. She was lying on a pallet in Braydic's comm room. Grauel sat beside her, a bowl of soup in her paw. Relief flooded her features.
Marika turned her head slowly. It ached terribly. She needed more goyin tea. She saw Bagnel and one of his comrades firing through narrow windows. Huntresses with bows waited behind them, occasionally stepped forward to loose an arrow while the males reloaded. Bombs were falling outside. They did little damage. Occasionally a metal pellet whined through one of the windows. Most of Braydic's beautiful equipment had been wrecked. All of it was dead. Marika could not feel a spectre of the electromagnetic fog.
Barlog knelt beside Grauel. "Are you all right, Marika?"
"My head aches. I need a double draft of goyin tea." She then realized it was daylight out. She had slept a long time. "How bad is it? How did I get here?"
"It is very bad, pup." She presented the tea, which had been prepared. "We are the last." She gestured. The two tradermales. A dozen huntresses, counting herself and Grauel. Braydic. A dozen worker pups cowering in the nether reaches of the room. "We carried you up when it became clear the nomads would take the underparts of the packstead. Take as little of that tea as you can. You have been drinking too much."
"The sisters. Where are the sisters?"
"All fallen. All but you. A valiant struggle, I am sure. One the savages will recall for a thousand generations. We will be sung into their legends."
Grauel exchanged glances with Barlog. "Are you too weak, Marika? You are the last silth. And we need to hold them off awhile longer. Just awhile."
"Why? What is the point? Akard is fallen."
Braydic replied, "Because help is coming, pup. From the Maksche cloister. Because of what you discovered about the Serke sister. They want to see the body for themselves. You see? Never abandon hope. You may then be too late to profit from what the All has in store."
"I killed her," Marika said. "Gruesomely. They will not find enough left of her to identify."
"They did not need to know that down there," Braydic countered. "Shall we turn them away?"
A burst of explosions sounded outside. Marika turned to Grauel and Barlog. "Help is too late once again, eh?"
Barlog looked at her oddly, with a hint of awe. "Perhaps. And perhaps the All is moving through the world."
Puzzled, Marika glanced at Grauel and surprised the same look there. What were they thinking?
She said, "More food. I am starving. Famished." When no one moved, she pouted. "Find me something to eat. I can do nothing till I have eaten." Her body did feel as though she had fasted for days. "Those pups are beginning to look tasty."
They brought her food. It was dried trail rations of the sort prepared for the summer nomad hunts. Tough as hide. And right then very tasty.
Outside, the racket of the siege continued to rise. Bagnel and his comrade looked ready to collapse. But those two were, for the moment, the only line of defense.
Marika went among the ghosts again, for the last time at Akard. They were few, but not so few as when the nomad silth had been more numerous. And the big dark killer still hovered on high, as though waiting to be used and fed. She called it down.
She ravened among the besiegers, fueling herself with fear and anger and an unquenchable lust for requiting what had been done to the Degnan. She allowed all the hidden shadows, so long repressed, to the fore, and gave them free rein. But she was one silth alone, and the nomads were growing skilled at evading silth attack, at hiding under a mantle of protection extended by their own wild silth, who were in the packfast themselves. Blood ran deep, but Marika feared not deep enough. The savages continued to hammer at the last bastion.
The day proceeded, and despite Marika's efforts the siege turned worse. One after another, her companions were hit by fire coming through the two windows. There was no place to hide from ricochets. The nomads tried to throw explosives inside, and that she forestalled each time, but each time it distracted her from her effort to destroy the wild silth.
Collapse was moments away She knew she could hold no longer, that her will did have its limits. And as she faced the absolute, resolute, and unyielding herself, she found that she had only the old regret. There would be no Mourning for the Degnan. And a new. There would be no journey to Maksche, which might have been the next step on her road leading toward the stars.
The hammer of weaponry rose toward the insane. Bagnel dared not return fire, for a swarming buzz of metal now came through the windows. The pellets were chewing Braydic's machines into chopped metal and glass.
The firing ceased. Bagnel bounced up for a look. Braydic whimpered. "Now they will come."
Marika nodded. And did something she never did before. She hugged Grauel and Barlog in turn.
Pups of the upper Ponath packs hugged no one but their dams, and that seldom after their first few years.
The two huntresses were touched.
Stray nomad weapons resumed a sporadic fire apparently meant to keep Bagnel away from his window.
Grauel rejoined the tradermale. She was trying to learn to use a rifle. Bagnel's companion could no longer lift his.
A slumping Marika suddenly went rigid. Her jaw dropped. "Wait! Something ... "
Something mighty, something terrible in its power, was roaring toward her up the valley of the Hainlin. For a moment she was paralyzed by her terror of that raging shadow. Then she hurled herself to the one window facing down the river.
She saw three great daggerlike crosses hurtling up the river's course, above the devastation left by the flood released with the collapse of the dams. They charged into the teeth of the wind, flying like great raptors fifty feet above the surface in an absolutely rigid V formation.