Then blackness drowned him. His bow was in his hand, but he had not had time to raise it, or even see what it was that had killed Ben and was almost killing himself.
Consciousness returned, out of a crazy pain-filled fantasy that was not a dream but a memory. He lay face down on hard, wet gravel. He was shivering to a cold, slow rain.
His first thought was astonishment at being alive, his second to get his wings to wrap around him, covering his nakedness against the rain.
When he tried to move something wrapped around his neck, so tight that he could hardly breathe, tugged him back.
Panic shook him. He tugged at the coil around his neck; it would not loosen. His hand flashed to his knife, but it was gone. He was tied by the neck, like a food-beast awaiting slaughter.
Sitting up more carefully, he saw that he was tied to a great machine, spearhead-shaped, that lay on the gravel. It was mottled in brown and yellow, but under it was the glint of silvery metal.
Ten paces away lay the squat butchered corpse of Ben. A faint pathetic mechanical squeal came from the silvery cube of the small Watcher that had brought him; it would bring no one ever again, for the explosion that had killed Ben had blasted it as well, and it lay sparking feebly, cracked and broken, on the gravel.
"Good to see you awake, boy!"
The booming voice caught Org Rider by surprise. He moved suddenly and was jerked back by the choking coil around his neck. When he caught his balance he saw a man, taller than himself, red-bearded, green- eyed, half grinning, rocking on his feet by the small pile of the boy's weapons and wings.
"Who are you?" the boy demanded.
"Why," the man said, "you can call me Redlaw. You're a long way from home, Fifteenth."
The boy kept off his face the sinking astonishment that this man knew his name. "I am not Fifteenth anymore," he said stubbornly. "My name is Org Rider."
The man's laugh boomed out. "An Org Rider without an org? Your brother was right, boy, you're a fool." Then he said, not unkindly, "Oh, don't be surprised. The Watchers don't only watch. They listen as well. We've been listening to you for a long time."
"How?" the boy cried. "I never saw you before!" The man only shrugged and smiled. "I've never seen any Watcher," the boy said. "And you have never been on our mountain I am certain."
"You're making a wrong assumption," the man said. Tm not a Watcher. I work for them. As butcher in their galleys"—he gestured at the bloodstained apron he wore—"and sometimes as translator, when they want to know what people like you are saying. But I know you are truthful when you say you've never seen a Watcher, because they don't look a bit like you or me."
"Then where are the Watchers?" Org Rider cried.
"You'll see them soon enough." The man stirred the boy's weapons with a foot, and peered at the boy out of shrewd green eyes. "It's not you they care about, you know," he said suddenly. "It's your dead friend here. What do you know about him?"
"Nothing," Org Rider said proudly, fighting back the pain and dizziness that were tearing at him. Dried blood on his arms and in his hair showed where he had been struck. No one had troubled to do anything about it while he was unconscious. "He appeared from nowhere. I do not know how. I had never seen him before. This is true."
"Oh," Redlaw said, "I believe you. Whether the watchers will or not is something else. But you'll find out—one way or another—because here they come now."
A section out of the middle of the ship dropped flat, to make a wide door and a ramp. Five creatures came flapping out and dropped to the rock around Redlaw, staring from a distance at the boy.
Though they waddled on two legs when they were not flying, they did not look human. They were squat and powerful-looking, like the man who had died so quickly and uselessly. Even more so; they were hardly half the height of Org Rider or Redlaw. But the ways in which they differed from human were extreme.
They wore slick bright armor that looked as if it grew on them, black on their humped backs and red on their bellies; an Earthling would have thought of an insect's chitin, but there were no true insects for comparison in the boy's world. Their armored arms looked thick and muscular, and their wings were yellow- streaked leather—it looked frighteningly like tanned human skin to the boy—that stretched from their arms to their stubby legs. Their faces were beaked. They had no necks. Wide black flexible ears spread out from each side of their beaks. Their multiple eyes were greenish bulges, set on each side of the head, protruding out, behind the ears.
Their hands horrified the boy when he looked at them more closely. For fingers they had short, boneless bundles of what looked like squirming pink food- worms. These twisting worms were palping every seam of his tented wings, every strap of his flying gear.
They emitted a foul odor that struck him in a suffocating wave. It took his breath and stung his eyes, with a sour scent like death-weeds burning. Even Redlaw, who clearly had had opportunity to get used to it, was wrinkling his nose and showing distaste.
The creatures squeaked to each other and then paused, with big ears spread, as if expecting an answer. One of them was holding the needled guide that had been his mother's gift, the direction-showing trinket. The boy shouted: "That's mine! You have no right to rob me!"
"Easy, boy," Redlaw said tightly. "You're very close to being dead right now. Don't push it."
The Watchers squeaked to each other, then once again went through the routine of palping his wings, his garments, his waterskin, his firepot, knife, coils of rope, empty pots. Then they moved, like stumps rocking across the graveled rock, to where the dead man lay. They did not touch him, perhaps from fear. But they squeaked again, this time peremptorily.
Redlaw scowled uneasily, and puckered his lips to whistle some sort of message. It was not much like the squeaks of the Watchers but it was as close as a human could come, Org Rider thought; and the Watchers seemed to understand it. They replied.
Redlaw nodded and turned to the boy. "I've told them what you say. Two of them think you are lying. One thinks you are too stupid to lie. The other two have not yet made up their minds."
The boy was silent, letting that information soak through his brain.
"You see," Redlaw said, "this strange-looking fellow here is very disconcerting to them." He squinted thoughtfully at the racked body that lay staring sightlessly at nothing. "In a way they know that what you say is true. In another way, they are not sure. Why did he come to you, boy? By accident? They'll never believe that."
"I know nothing more than what I've told you," said Org Rider stubbornly. "If I die for it."
"You just might," Redlaw observed mildly, then flinched as a blast of whistling came from the Watchers.
In quite a different tone he demanded: "Why don't you carry the Watchman's eye?"
"What is it?"
"The talisman of their service!" Redlaw touched a sort of medallion he wore around his own neck. "Like this, boy! To show you are their friend and servant, like me!"
"My people are not servants," the boy declared.
"Maybe that used to be true," Redlaw acknowledged. "Your people lived almost out of range. But times are changing. This fellow here is making them change. I think you will go away from here wearing an eye if you go away at all, Org Rider."
A burst of peremptory whistling, and two of the Watchers waddled toward the boy. The yellow coil around his neck tightened, half-strangling him, forcing him to his knees. The man warned: "Don't resist them, boy! It's your life."
The bitter reek set him sneezing even while he gasped for breath. A leather wing slapped him into silence, knocked him down. A hot, hard-armored body fell on him, and those pink, writhing fingers searched his body, prying into mouth and nostrils, anus and ears. The weight, the pain, the indignity, the lack of air all combined to fill the boy with a helpless fury. He could not cope with it, he could only rage inside himself, in pain and fear, until at last the weight came off him and the Watchers took their foul reek away, whistling disagreeably among themselves.