"I hope it got that cursed wolf too!" raged Lefty. "I should have killed him when I wanted to first!"
Nelson, at that moment, heard a wolf-howl from nearby, and realized that Tark had escaped the blast in time.
"He rouses the city!" Shan Kar cried furiously. "But Barin shall pay the penalty for his trick! If we can reach our horses—"
They scrambled furiously up the gully of the dry streambed to the forested ridge. Nelson, gasping, turned and looked back. Out of torchlit Vruun, four-footed shapes were racing swiftly on their track. A terrific wolf-cry echoed up from that band of racing creatures, a heart-stopping sound.
Nelson seemed to himself in the next minutes, to be watching from another dimension as the three of them fled through the forest along the ridge. He was two men, and one of them was watching like a disembodied ka of himself while the other self expended every ounce of energy in flight.
"We're near the horses!" Shan Kar encouraged. "Diril will be waiting with them."
Again, from much closer behind them, came Tark's terrific hunting-cry. Lefty Wister stopped and whirled around, his pinched face a white blur, his voice hoarse and wild.
"I won't be hunted by that brute! I'll kill him!" He had his gun raised, was crouched, looking back.
"Lefty, keep your head!" cried Nelson, checking in mid-stride to turn back.
"Leave the man or you die with him!" cried Shan Kar from the darkness ahead.
He ought to, Nelson knew. It was sheer folly to try to save the Cockney, whose brain had given way to unreasoning hatred and horror.
He owed no more to Lefty than to the others. Mere fortune of war had thrown him into company of the hardbitten, crime-stained little band and he had no loyalty due to any of them. But the ingrained tradition of supporting a comrade-in-arms was too much for Nelson.
He turned back, grabbed the Cockney's arm. "Lefty, come—"
It was as far as he got. That brief delay had been enough for those who followed to overtake Lefty and himself. Dark, leaping shadows of wolf and tiger came plunging through the dry brush. Tark's thought-cry leaped ahead of him.
"We will not kill if you—"
Lefty Wister's automatic poured a stream of fire at the vague shadow of the wolf. Nelson saw Tark dodge with inhuman swiftness an instant before the other fired, then saw the wolf at the Cockney's throat.
He heard Lefty's bubbling, horrible scream as he triggered his own pistol at the dim shapes rushing upon him.
He saw the blazing, awful eyes of a striped beast leaping toward him from the right. An upraised giant paw eclipsed everything as he tried to swing his gun around in time.
Then Nelson saw nothing.
Chapter IX
JUDGMENT OF THE GUARDIAN
"The man stirs, mistress! I told you that he was but stunned."
Nelson heard that queer voice inside his mind, as he floated through infinities of aching darkness.
"Tark, it might be better for him if he had died out there in the forest!"
It seemed to Nelson that time had doubled back upon itself and that he lay again in the squalid inn in Yen Shi as he had lain that night he had first heard the thought-voices in his dreams.
But the throbbing pain in his head was no dream. He tried to raise his hand toward his temple and discovered by the attempt that his sitting body was bound in a chair.
Fear and memory pounced together upon Nelson's mind. He made a convulsive effort and opened his eyes. Brilliant sunlight from an open window caught his eye first and then the detail of the room focused slowly.
It was a high-ceilinged, long gallery with pale blue glassy walls. The sunlight danced and quivered and shimmered off those walls, sunbeams seeming to play around the room.
Nsharra sat in a chair six feet from him, and the great wolf, Tark, crouched like a dog beside her. Both were watching him. Subconsciously, he'd expected it. He'd remembered their disputing thought-voices as he had heard them at Yen Shi. He knew he'd heard them more clearly now because he still wore the thought-crown.
"Yes," said Nsharra quietly. "You are in Vruun, where you wished to come, Eric Nelson."
It was strange to hear his name from her lips and to remember that night in Yen Shi when he had told it to her between kisses. And it was stranger, to Nelson, to see her here sitting in her chair like a gray-eyed young princess in white silk and to realize that this was the singsong girl of that faraway night.
"Lefty?" he said. He said it without hope and the girl nodded her dark head slightly.
"Tark was forced to kill him. It was courageous of you to turn back for him. If you had not you too might have—"
She stopped. But Nelson, every sense sharpened to acuteness by his situation, seized on the unfinished sentence.
"I too might have escaped, you were going to say? Then Shan Kar did escape?"
Nsharra said nothing but her lids had half-veiled her eyes for a moment and Nelson knew that he had guessed correctly. For a moment, he wondered what Nick Sloan and Shan Kar would do now. Sloan wouldn't give up the campaign to crush the Brotherhood-not with a fortune in platinum to win.
Then, mentally, Eric Nelson shrugged his shoulders. What difference did it make to him now?
"Are you going to kill me too?" he asked directly.
"Are you afraid of death?" Nsharra countered.
He answered levelly. "I don't want to die. But I think I can manage it if I have to."
Nsharra smiled faintly. "That is an honest answer, Eric Nelson." Then her face sobered swiftly. "But it is not mere death you have to fear."
Tark looked up at the girl. The wolf's thought came clearly to Nelson.
"Mistress, I did what I could with the others of the Council. But your father is grimly resolved and Quorr and Hatha demand vengeance."
"And Ei?" questioned Nsharra's thought.
"Who knows the Winged One's mind?" countered the wolf. "They will all be here soon to judge the man."
Nelson had watched this silent discussion between the girl and wolf in a strange fascination that had undertones of horror. Witch-girl and her familiars! Mistress of kuei, Li Kin had called her! Not human, not wholly human—
Nsharra apparently read the thought behind his staring gaze. For a quick flush mantled her olive face.
"You are here for judgment, not I, outlander!" she flashed. "Do not look at me so!"
Witch-girl, maybe, but utterly feminine in that reaction, Nelson thought. The door opened suddenly and a man stood in the doorway looking in at them.
Nelson knew at once this was the Guardian of the Brotherhood — Kree, Nsharra's father. He had the stamp of authority on his face. He was old enough to have iron-gray hair but he stood sword-straight in the doorway. He wore a loose black silken tunic and trousers, and over them a long, gold-worked black cloak.
His piercing dark eyes were bent upon Nelson, but it was to Nsharra and Tark he spoke.
"So the outlander has regained his senses? That is well. The Clan leaders wish to see him."
He came into the room, and a great tiger stalked softly in after him. And with click of hoofs on the floor came too the big fire-eyed black stallion whom Nelson remembered also from Yen Shi.
Wings swished and through the broad open window swept an enormous eagle that perched lightly on the back of Nsharra's big chair.
Clan-leaders of the Brotherhood! Beast-eyes and bird-eyes watching him, judging him! Nelson's stomach began to crawl. It wasn't just fear. It was the outer world tradition of man and beast as separate orders of being that put a horror of this unhuman panel of judges into his mind.
Tark rose to his feet and looked at Kree and at the stallion and tiger and eagle.
"Before you judge, brothers, remember that this outlander is the last thread by which we may still draw Barin out of danger!"