Blade snatched up a fallen spear and dashed toward the creature. He came in from the side, drove the spear point into the ground, and pole-vaulted up onto the stolof's back. For a moment he had to fight not to slide right off again. Then he braced himself and shouted.
«Neena! Here!»
The princess heard him, turned, and sprang toward the stolof. Blade bent down as she leaped, heaving her up beside him on the creature's back. Before its sluggish wits could react to what was happening, Blade practically threw Neena up onto the walkway of the city wall. As the stolof started to move, Blade caught the railing and heaved himself up after Neena.
He'd held onto his spear, and it was a good thing that he had. Someone in the gate tower shouted, and someone else let fly with an arrow. It came uncomfortably close. Before the archer could shoot again, Blade picked him out from among his comrades and hurled the spear. It was a long shot, but Blade's eye and arm had a machine's precision tonight. The archer staggered as the spear drove into his thigh just below his armor, then toppled back against the tower railing. It gave with a crack and he vanished from sight with a scream, to land with a splash in the water-filled ditch below.
Blade turned and sprang up onto the outer railing of the wall. Neena joined him. The darkness beyond the ditch looked friendly and welcoming. Neena squeezed Blade's hand briefly, then they both leaped out and down, aiming for the far side of the ditch.
It was a long jump and a long drop, but they both landed safely. Blade felt as though every bone in his body and all the teeth in his mouth had been jarred loose from one another. But he sprang instantly to his feet and helped Neena up. In a few more seconds they were on the move, heading away from the city into that friendly darkness at a dead run.
They ran and they ran and they ran. Gradually the roar of the flames, the trumpets and drums of the soldiers, the shouts of angry or frightened people faded behind them. Gradually the forest grew thicker around them and behind them. Even the glow of the great fire faded away. They ran on, with no sound but their footsteps, their breathing, and the chirrr of night insects.
They ran on, until finally neither of them could have gone a step farther if all the stolofs in Trawn had been at their heels. Blade barely had the strength to find a concealing clump of bushes and carry Neena to it. Then he lay down beside her and let sleep take him.
It was a more pleasant sleep than he'd known since he'd entered this dimension. For the first time he was free.
Chapter 14
The jungle awoke the next morning in a hideous uproar of bird cries, animal howls, the squalling and squealing of apes, the clak and drone of insects. The uproar jerked Blade up out of sleep like an alarm signal. Neena awoke more slowly, sat up and listened without even opening her eyes, then lay back down and drifted off to sleep again. Either her trained ears hadn't caught anything in all the uproar that might mean danger, or she was too exhausted to care.
Blade let her sleep and listened more carefully himself. After a while he could pick out fifty or sixty distinct sounds from the jungle around him. None of them sounded at all human, or like the chittering of a stolof on the hunt.
Blade decided that Neena had the best idea, and lay down again. Here they had a good hiding place, and their night's run must have given them a good many miles' head start on any possible pursuit. If they spent the day here, they could be out again after dark, rested, refreshed, and far better prepared to face anything they might meet. Blade stretched out, closed his ears to the jungle sounds, and drifted off to sleep.
He awoke with the sun well down in the sky and the light creeping through the bushes already turning red. Neena was wide awake, combing leaves and debris out of her hair.
They ate sour greenish white berries from a trailing vine and drank at a small stream nearby. Neena took bearings on the setting sun. Then they went back under the bush and waited until darkness settled down over the forest.
«The stolofs can see and sense equally well by day or by night,» she said. «The same is not true of their masters. Those of Trawn fear the forests by night. In a way, they are wise to do so. At night the forests of Gleor can be deadly to one who knows them not. I, on the other hand-«
«-have been at home in them since you were three years old?» Blade finished the sentence for her.
Neena laughed. «No, I was not allowed into the forest until I was nine. I have still spent ten years learning its ways. That is ten years more than most of the warriors of Trawn. Against ill luck there is no defense. Otherwise I think we shall come safely to my last camp, and then to the lands of Draad.»
«Why your camp? Why not go straight home?»
«Blade, perhaps you wish to show how strong you are by roaming the forests of Gleor naked and practically unarmed. I have no such desire. In that camp I left spears, bows, clothing and boots, bottles for water, even some dried meat. There is also Kubona.» Her face turned hard. «I cannot give her vengeance now, although she shall have it sooner or later. I can give her bones proper burial, and her spirit the prayers to speed its passing.»
They left their hiding place as soon as it was fully dark. Neena led the way for a few hundred yards through a nightmarish tangle of vines and underbrush, to thoroughly confuse their trail. Then she swung west, onto a well-beaten animal trail, and once on the trail settled down to a steady trot.
They kept going all night, with only one short stop for rest and water and one short detour around a small hunters' camp. Shortly before dawn they drank again from a muddy pool and ate the meat of several fallen koba nuts. Then they scrambled forty feet up a spreading tree, found a perch screened by its long trailing leaves, and went to sleep.
For three more days and three more nights this pattern repeated itself. Once they found a pool large enough for them to bathe. Blade pulled a foot-long fish out of that pool, but Neena took one look at it and threw it back.
«A ti-ter fish,» said Neena briefly. «Our hunters use the fluid from its liver and bladder to poison their arrows.»
Another time they had to spend an hour of darkness perched high in a tree. At the foot of the tree a seventy-foot snake was curling up to sleep off a meal. When the snake hadn't moved for an hour, Blade and Neena crept down the tree and slipped silently away into the darkness.
Blade got a good look at the snake as they slipped past it. Its mouth was six feet wide, large enough to swallow a stolof or two or three men at one gulp.
On the fourth morning they did not seek out a hiding place for the day. Instead Neena took another set of bearings on the sun, then led the way off to the north.
«I think we shall be reaching the camp today,» she said. «It will be easier to find it by day than by night, even for me.»
«What about our friends from Trawn?»
«There is not much danger from them any more, I think. We are beyond where the hunters usually go. Anyone who has been chasing us from the city itself is certainly at least a day's march behind us.»
Neena followed as straight a course as the jungle would let her until just before noon. Then she stopped and began casting back and forth like a hunting dog, looking for the marks she'd left to show the way back to the camp. As she did that, Blade kept his eyes roaming back and forth, scanning the jungle around them. Neena's contempt for the soldiers and hunters of Trawn made her willing to assume that they were all many miles away. Blade, stubbornly cautious, refused to share that assumption.