He was leaving Luchare behind, and his inner soul winced at the thought. She was not dead, he knew, despite his loss of mental strength; they were linked forever and he would know if she were dead, just as she would know if he were to perish. She had Mitrash of the guard and the hidden help of the Eleveners to protect her. She had Klootz, who would obey her when Hiero was not there. She had her royal father, who had been told enough to alert him. The mad young duke and the cunning priest would not find it easy to outwit her.
Trouble was coming to D’alwah—indeed, was already there. As prince and heir, he had tried to rally the southern kingdom against the Unclean peril. He had been interrupted, his plans broken and set aside, if not destroyed. But he was the sole emissary of the Metz Republic in this strange world of the far South. It was his duty to go on, to find new weapons, to keep up the fight. His lost mental powers might be reborn someday, but if not—so be it. Something else, other weapons, would have to do instead. While life lasted, he must go on, ignoring all personal calls in the interest of the greater task the Abbey Fathers and Brother Aldo had laid on him.
All day, under the burning sky, the bronzed figure trotted patiently along. His sharp eyes missed nothing of his surroundings as he ate up the miles. Small, dun-colored birds appeared, peering at him from rocky outcroppings, and the different types of cacti and desert shrubs increased. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the bluish tint was fading from the soil. A colony of little striped rodents chattered at him from an assemblage of holes in a sandy bank, but did not seem really concerned at his passing. Looking back, he could see them return to their own affairs while he was still within easy vision. This was an attitude on the part of the locals that he welcomed; it meant that men were little known in this land and hence not feared.
What he wanted at the moment was anonymity. Each league put behind him took him deeper into country where he would be lost to his foes. There would be time enough later to look for allies. This was a time to hide, to vanish utterly from human knowledge.
As the day drew to a close, he began to look for shelter. Food was no longer a problem. In his pouch, along with the rancid meat, he had a dozen cactus fruits, their needled fuzz carefully rubbed off. There were cacti of a different, smaller sort far to the north in the Kandan woods, and he knew them to be highly nutritious. Further, he had found a hollowed-out nest of some fairly large bird or reptile and had cracked the four hen-sized eggs and gulped them down on the spot. Metz Rovers were past masters at living off the country, and he had no fear of starving, especially since the land before him grew more benign with the waning of the desert. He sensed more life all about him. With the coming of night, there would also appear prowlers. It was a time to seek shelter again. Presently, in the red glow of sunset, he thought he saw what he sought.
An hour later, he felt he could relax, at least as much as anyone could relax in an unknown wilderness. He had found a low hillock of rock with one steep side. Halfway up this face was a shallow ledge, shallow but deep enough in the rock for him to lie down under the small overhang. There was also a little hollow in the ledge itself, well back from the lip. In this cavity, protected from most of the rare desert rains, Hiero found the remains of ancient ashes. The sides of the shelf curled around to enclose him as he sat over his tiny fire, made with a bundle of easily gathered twigs from the dry soil below. Only from the south and very near could his small light have been seen. The smear of ash looked incredibly old, made from fires created Heaven only knew how far back in time.
As he stirred his tiny glow with a twig, Hiero could have posed for the figure of some Apache hunter of the immemorial past, only the black mustache testifying to the mixed ancestry of the Metz. He had finished the meat, now charred into something resembling palatability by the fire, and a half dozen of the sweet and fully ripe red cactus fruits. Half his water, foul from its skin container, was untouched. He did not need it, but it would be saved; nasty as it was, it was still water. Beside him on the rock lay several long, dead cactus branches, their dried spines burned off with care. Thrust into the tiny fire, they would become instant torches, a potent weapon should any wild creature try to clamber up to Hiero’s perch and use him for its own repast.
Half-turning his body to gather a few more sticks from the pile behind him, he saw something which he had missed on his first exploration of the ledge. Faintly etched into the rock behind and above his head were pictures, revealed by the glow of the fire striking up at them. They were worn, old beyond reckoning, and he could read little of them. There were stick figures of men and four-legged beasts, though what they were was impossible to say. He felt strangely cheered by this fresh proof that men had used this place, however long ago.
He looked out over the flat landscape before him, stretching out under moon and stars until it was lost in the dimness of the South. The stars burned far and bright. The black of scrub and rock made the shadowed country seem a monochrome illusion, a sharply limned mirror image of the bright world he had traversed under the azure sky of the day.
A howl rang out from the middle distance, to be answered by a chorus of similar yells farther off. From the sounds, the Metz judged the makers to be pack hunters of some size. He hoped they were not on his track, though he had protected himself as well as he could. The calls were not unlike those of the wolves of his own Northland, though higher in pitch, and he smiled reminiscently. Whatever the creatures sought, however, it was not he, and he listened with only part of his attention as the hunt swept away south out of earshot. As the sound died, he allowed his minute fire to do the same, leaving only a bed of glowing coals. He would wake, he knew, at frequent enough intervals to renew it.
Not for the first time, he wondered what lay ahead of him. It was useless to speculate, he knew. His Forty Symbols, the precognition markers he had been trained to use since childhood, and the crystal globe that accompanied them were far back with his other belongings in D’alwah City. Even had they not been, his ability to use them was gone, and they would have been so much useless trash. He would have to face the future as most other humans of this day and age did and take what came as God and His Son sent.
Presently he fell into a light slumber, knowing his senses would awaken him at need. At first his sleep was dreamless. After a while, his fist clenched and his jaw tightened. His slumber remained unbroken and his breath still came evenly. Nothing moved out in the plain below him, save for the ordinary life of the waste places of the earth. No menacing sound broke the silence of the night.
Yet deep in the mind of the warrior, a faint alert flickered. Perhaps not all of his former powers had quite been silenced and suppressed. Some minute synapse had been started up or impinged upon, some blanketed circuit half-alerted. Into his mind came a thought of hills—smoky, purple hills, with mist rising from folded valleys, their rounded tops a mixture of forest and steep meadow. Strange hills, never seen in life, far lower than the mighty Stonies, the great Shining Mountains of his far-off home, but—hills! He sighed in his sleep and threw one brown arm across his face. In his dream the hills receded, but not altogether. Somewhere deep in his subconscious, their memory lingered. He would see those hills. They were very beautiful.
He awoke before dawn the next day and went hunting. The faint coolness of the desert morning dissipated quickly, and he was warm in a few seconds as he searched for tracks. Soon, under some flat-topped trees, a new sign of better ground, he found a slot, the mark of some dainty, hoofed mammal. The tracks were fresh, and his fine nose could even catch a faint musky warmth where the beast had rubbed itself against a scraggy trunk and left a few brown hairs. He followed cautiously, noting that the animal was not afraid, but lazing along, snatching a mouthful of leaf here and there. The faint breeze blowing came from its direction to him. Soon he saw it moving ahead in the dawn light, a lone antelope of small breed, with lyrate horns and brindle hair.