Someone was there; he saw the glimmer of cloth off to one side on the slope. Instantly upon his outcry, it vanished, and he left the path to follow, leaping over fallen trees and little rivulets running through the soft, mossy earth. Someone was there ahead of him in the darkening daylight…
A girl.
“Please!” he called. “I won’t hurt you! I don’t want — They’re all dead, all the others — the rogue dragon—”
She stopped at that; stopped and whirled around. The shock of it stopped him, too. For a moment they stood staring at one another. It was the girl he had tried to help on the Court House mall; the girl who had struck at him, run away, as she was, in the next instant, running now.
“Don’t leave me here alone,” he cried, despairingly. “The dogs—! The dogs—!” They were nearer now, and nearer and nearer; they seemed to be all around him. He could no longer see the girl. He snatched up a stick of thick wood and looked to see a large tree that he could get his back against — or, better, climb. But he was passing through an area that had been burned over not many years enough before; there were no large trees at all.
“Don’t run!” A man’s voice. He whirled around. The dogs had been on all sides of him because the men who were leading them on thick ropes of braided leather were on all sides of him. He let out his relief in a gusty sigh and let the stick drop.
“Oh, Lord… I’m so glad to see you… I was on the hunt, back there—” he gestured, indefinitely; he no longer knew just how far or in what direction “back there” was. The men were dressed in hides and cloth; two of them handed over their leashes to others and came towards him.
“It was a rogue dragon, and it wouldn’t die, it wouldn’t die—” The words caught and clicked in his throat.
The two men looked at each other. Little lights seemed to kindle in their eyes.
“Was it?” said one.
“Wouldn’t it?” said the other.
They came up to him and he put out his hand. With untroubled but with deft emphatic movements, one took that hand and one took the other and they swung them behind his back and tied them fast with thongs.
“Walk on,” said one. “Just walk. No tricks. It’s easier to let loose the dogs than to hold on to them.”
He picked up Jon-Joras’s stick and thumped him in the ribs with it. “Walk!” he said, again. Jon-Joras walked.
IV
There had been no ponies on MM beta. It seemed to Jon-Joras that there was no longer any skin on the inside of his thighs. His hands were now free, but his feet were bound instead, by a line passing under the pony’s belly. The dogs loped alongside, from time to time looking up at him — hungrily, it seemed. Their eyes glowed red in the torch-light. He did not remember dozing off, but when he snapped awake, two men who had been holding his arms on either side withdrew.
The uncertain flaring light showed nothing that told him where he was. Not on the interminable path any more, for certain; it was not wide enough for three men to ride abreast. One of the riders grunted, pointed. Another, nodding, said something which vanished into a yawn. Jon-Joras, following the gesture, saw a great black block of rock canted at an angle. Vines grew over it. There was another. And another. The soft thudding of the ponies’ hooves suddenly began to echo, the air was instantly closer. They were in a tunnel of some sort; a tunnel which wound around and around, always up-hill. The smell was faint, but it was an alien smell, and he shuddered at it.
A wave of cool air washed his face; the echo vanished. Stars were overhead, but only overhead… not to the sides. He felt, rather than saw, the encircling wall which must be there. Where this place was, and what this place was, he had no idea. But he felt certain that it was never built by the men who held him captive.
The hunt itself had taken toll of him a drain of nervous energy equivalent to many days hard work; his long walk, his flight from the dogs, the ride… He fell from the pony, but the pain (as they loosed his bonds) seemed academic. His body was being hurt, but he — Jon-Joras — was not his body. Vaguely, he was aware of being half-carried down a long, winding ramp into a room where torches blazed in sockets on walls so high he did not see the tops. Food was set before him, he ate, nodded, slumped onto the tables. Men stripped him of his trousers, rubbed his sore skin with curiously-scented salve. He fell asleep again while this was being done.
But even in his sleep he heard the hissing, heard the low, almost melancholy call of the dragon.
He awoke on a pile of hides and rushes, sunlight streaming through a window very high up. He blinked. It was not a window, but a breach in the smooth black wall that went up and up and up…The room he was in was not quite a wall, but a partition of planks which scarcely reached higher than his head. He began to get up, stopped, with a sharp cry of pain.
Every muscle seemed sore — including muscles the existence of which he had not known before. He thought that a hot bath might relieve the soreness in tendons and ligaments, as well as remove the grime and dried sweat — but he feared what it might do to the raw skin on the inside of his upper legs. And, at any rate, where in this place — half improvised camp, half ancient ruin — could he expect to find a hot bath?
The answer came sooner than he expected. A fat, toothless old woman came bustling in with a bowl of hot water and a rag. “You’ll have to get up now,” she said. “I’m going to be needing this room to sort my potatoes. Wash up and get along.”
If this were a prison, it was an odd and informal one. He winced, but was glad of the wash, such as it was. “I don’t know where to get along to,” he said, scrubbing gingerly. The old woman said that this wasn’t her problem. So, carrying the trousers he didn’t dare to try to put back on, he wandered out into the hall which sloped down between the partitions. Again the light coming through the hole far up caught his attention. He followed the shaft of sunlight to where it lit on the opposite wall, and it was there that something struck his attention.
It appeared to be a frieze; high up as it was, and at a bad angle, obscured by dirt and cobwebs in places, he could not clearly make it out. But one figure seemed to leap into focus. It was not a human figure. With a blink and a shudder, he understood. He was in one of the ruined and abandoned castles of the noisome and chitin-mantled Kar-chee.
But who the people were who had moved into it as a hermit-crab moves into an abandoned shell, he had yet to learn.
At any rate, they took a friendly enough interest in him as he hobbled slowly along. Someone offered him a fried egg; someone offered him a boiled potato. Someone offered him a finespun tunic that had seen better days. And someone offered to apply another dressing of salve to his saddle-sores, and to bandage them as well. He accepted all these offers.
After thanking the last donor, and finding that he could now walk much more comfortably, he said, “I am not complaining… but how is it that I’m not tied anymore?”
The bandager, a middle-aged man with a broken nose, said, matter-of-factly, “Why, because you couldn’t get out of here until we were ready to let you. Other than that, it’s Liberty Hall.” He chuckled briefly.
Jon-Joras said, “But I must get out of here. I have duties… outside.”
The bandager gave a grim little nod. “We all have duties… outside. For the time being, though, some of us have our duties… inside… as well.”