Blood.
For here a battle had been fought. Zarqa’s keen eyes clearly read the signs of a struggle—the scuffed and broken bark which I had disturbed underfoot as I fought against a mysterious adversary whose identity Zarqa could not conjecture—a torn scrap of my cloak, still caught on a snag—and blood, blood all over, dripping in rivulets of gore between the corrugations of the bark-rings.
Zarqa stooped over the bloodstain, examining the crimson sign intently.
Was it my blood—or the blood of my enemy?
There was simply no way for him to tell the answer to that question.
His gaunt face grim with despair, the loyal Kalood launched himself into space again; airborne, great wings plying the breeze, the million-year-old creature began to search for any sign of me, living or dead.
But after that terrible crimson sign there was… nothing!
The predators who rule the wilderness of the giant trees are many and fearsome.
There are wild zaiphs, which, although they seldom turn upon men, have no compunctions against devouring their sometime masters and can be the deadliest of adversaries.
More to be dreaded are the colossal white-furred spiders, whose webs are built between the boles of the enormous trees themselves, and some of which stretch across a greater distance than the Golden Gate Bridge on my native planet.
The most feared of all, perhaps, are the rapacious and reptilian ythids; it would have been an irony of fate had Karn the Hunter fallen to their merciless charge, for his nation, the Red Dragon tribe, takes the ythid as its tribal emblem.
I could, of course, have simply slipped and fallen into the abyss; this does happen to the Laonese, although not very frequently, since they have a superb head for heights and are as surefooted as mountain goats. But the signs of my struggle, and in particular that huge and ominous blotch of blood, seemed to indicate that I had been attacked by some predator, with whom I had fought.
Whether in that struggle I had been the conqueror or the conquered, Zarqa did not know. But he did not despair; it is not the nature of his kind to yield to destiny, but to fight on until even the last chance was lost.
Towards night he gave over the search for a time, at least, for even his preterhuman constitution required rest.
But he had come by now a very long way from our encampment. To return to it seemed futile, for to continue the quest on the following morning would first require his retracing his flight all the way to where he now crouched resting on a twiglet.
And so Zarqa simply decided to stay here for the night. He would require no further sustenance for many weeks, and his gaunt and leathery hide needed no covering against the night’s chill. So he simply roosted there on the twiglet, his head tucked under one great wing, sleeping as soundly as the enormous bat be resembled.
With dawn he awoke, stretched, relieved him, drank a little clear cold water from a pool of dew cupped in an upturned leaf, and flew on about his quest. It was his intention to search the entire tree in a careful and methodical fashion. He assumed there was no means by which I could have crossed to the other tree, on whose branch the Yellow City was built; therefore, his search was, for the present, confined to the tree in which he had spent the night.
His search was terminated brutally and swiftly.
A piercing pain stabbed through him suddenly as he was in mid-flight.
He turned to see a terrible black arrow had pierced the drumhead-taut membrane of his right wing.
Already he was losing momentum as air leaked through the torn membrane; the wound gaped wider—it was being torn open by the pressure of the wind. He curved in his flight to settle on the nearest branch.
But before he could land, a second black arrow flashed toward him and caught him in the wing-joint itself.
Bright agony lanced along his nerves. His senses dimmed as the entire wing went numb.
Then he tumbled from the air, his injured wing unable to bear him up, and fell like a dead weight…
When he regained consciousness, Zarqa found himself stretched out on a branch surrounded by human beings. They were rough-looking men, with hard faces and vicious eyes, clad in the bright yellow japons and black cloaklets of the Ardhanese. They carried slim glassteel swords, hooked pikes, knobbed maces of black crystal, and each bore an enormous black bow.
They were arguing among themselves as Zarqa returned to consciousness and did not at first notice that he was awake. He seized that brief opportunity to ascertain the extent of his injuries. He had broken his left arm when he fell from the sky, as he learned from the stabbing pain that went through him when he tried to move it. His right wing was disabled, perhaps permanently, although so numb was the wing that he could not tell whether the black arrow had crippled the joint or merely passed through the flesh of it. He still wore his baldric, although the zoukar and its sheath had been unclipped, as the crystal rod resembled some kind of weapon.
Since he was unable to fly with his crippled wing, and could not very easily climb because of his broken arm, there seemed to be very little chance of making an escape. So, with the vast and patient pessimism of his kind, Zarqa simply awaited the next turn of events.
He listened to what the men who stood about were saying, hoping to gain some knowledge of their purpose toward him. A burly rogue with unshaven jowls was loudly cursing at the moment.
“By the Fangs of Balkh, I say let’s kill the thing here and be about our business! Even if it’s an amphashand or no, we’d no intent to hurt it, so what’s the pity? Claws of Aozond, mates, we thought it was a golden moth—”
” ‘We?’ What d’you mean?” growled one of the others, a wizened little man with a twisted back. ” ‘Twas you, and you alone, cut down the blessed amphashand with your black arrow, Gulquond—none of our doing!”
The others growled nervous assent at this, and the burly rogue the wizened little man had addressed as Gulquond flinched and paled visibly at the accusation. He licked his lips and his piggish little eyes flickered around as if desperately searching for a way out of the trap into which he had fallen.
Zarqa knew little enough about the religious beliefs of the human beings who shared this planet with him, but he understood that they considered the unknown region above the cloud banks to be the home of whatever various gods and genii and elementals and avatars they worshiped. And, as it chanced, he understood enough of their beliefs to know that the winged servants of these many godlike beings were called amphashands…
The members of the Ardhanese hunting party thought they had shot down an angel! If the situation had not been so dangerous, it would almost have been comical.
The main tenor of Gulquond’s argument was that the gaunt winged creature he had shot down by accident was no amphashand but merely a winged monster of some unknown kind, who must have descended to the tree-level from the unknown heights of the sky. He counseled they should cut its throat, tip it over the branch into the abyss, and be on their way.
An older man, with grizzled beard and streaks of silver in his fine, floating hair, thought otherwise. He kept turning over and over thoughtfully in his hands the zoukar he had taken from Zarqa’s baldric. Within the crystal tube a shaft of blue-white lightning writhed and snapped virulently.
“Monster the thing may be, but it goes armed like a creature from The World Above,” he said gruffly. “Look here, Gulquond, and quit your sniveling… what monster carries around a bolt o’ lightning instead of a sword?”
The other rogues crowded near to stare at the writhing thing with superstitious awe. Fear was clearly written on their faces.
“No,” said the older man, whose name Zarqa learned was Kalkar. “This is too important a matter for us to decide; I say let’s carry the monster or whatever it is before Arjala for judgment and disposal… creature’s got a busted arm, besides that broken wing… let’s make a stretcher from a couple of tents and poles, and carry it down real careful… if it dies before we get it to Arjala, she’ll have our hides, I warrant!”