Stark felt the knife blades working at the thongs. He waited. The
rawhide snapped, and he was free.
He did not fall. He would not have fallen then if he had taken a death
wound. He gathered his legs under him and sprang.
He picked up the spearman in that first rush and flung him into the
fire. Then he began to run toward the place where the scaly mounts were
herded, leaving a trail of blood behind him on the snow.
A man loomed up in front of him. He saw the shadow of a spear and
swerved, and caught the haft in his two hands. He wrenched it free and
struck down with the butt of it, and went on. Behind him he heard voices
shouting and the beginning of turmoil.
The Lord Ciaran turned and came back, striding fast.
There were men before Stark now, many men, the circle of watchers
breaking up because there had been nothing more to watch. He gripped the
long spear. It was a good weapon, better than the flint-tipped stick
with which the boy N'Chaka had hunted the giant lizard of the rocks.
His body curved into a half crouch. He voiced one cry, the challenging
scream of a predatory killer, and went in among the men.
He did slaughter with that spear. They were not expecting attack. They
were not expecting anything. Stark had sprung to life too quickly. And
they were afraid of him. He could smell the fear on them. Fear not of a
man like themselves, but of a creature less and more than man.
He killed, and was happy.
They fell away from him, the wild riders of Mekh. They were sure now
that he was a demon. He raged among them with the bright spear, and they
heard again that sound that should not have come from a human throat,
and their superstitious terror rose and sent them scrambling out of his
path, trampling on each other in childish panic.
He broke through, and now there was nothing between him and escape but
two mounted men who guarded the herd.
Being mounted, they had more courage. They felt that even a warlock
could not stand against their charge. They came at him as he ran, the
padded feet of their beasts making a muffled drumming in the snow.
Without breaking stride, Stark hurled his spear.
* * * * *
It drove through one man's body and tumbled him off, so that he fell
under his comrade's mount and fouled its legs. It staggered and reared
up, hissing, and Stark fled on.
Once he glanced over his shoulder. Through the milling, shouting crowd
of men he glimpsed a dark, mailed figure with a winged mask, going
through the ruck with a loping stride and bearing a sable axe raised
high for the throwing.
Stark was close to the herd now. And they caught his scent.
The Norland brutes had never liked the smell of him, and now the reek of
blood upon him was enough in itself to set them wild. They began to hiss
and snarl uneasily, rubbing their reptilian flanks together as they
wheeled around, staring at him with lambent eyes.
He rushed them, before they should quite decide to break. He was quick
enough to catch one by the fleshy comb that served it for a forelock,
held it with savage indifference to its squealing, and leaped to its
back. Then he let it bolt, and as he rode it he yelled, a shrill brute
cry that urged the creatures on to panic.
The herd broke, stampeding outward from its center like a bursting
shell.
Stark was in the forefront. Clinging low to the scaly neck, he saw the
men of Mekh scattered and churned and tramped into the snow by the
flying pads. In and out of the shelters, kicking the brush walls down,
lifting up their harsh reptilian voices, they went racketing through the
camp, leaving behind them wreckage as of a storm. And Stark went with
them.
He snatched a cloak from off the shoulders of some petty chieftain as he
went by, and then, twisting cruelly on the fleshy comb, beating with his
fist at the creature's head, he got his mount turned in the way he
wanted it to go, down the valley.
He caught one last glimpse of the Lord Ciaran, fighting to hold one of
the creatures long enough to mount, and then a dozen striving bodies
surged around him, and Stark was gone.
The beast did not slacken pace. It was as though it thought it could
outrun the alien, bloody thing that clung to its back. The last fringes
of the camp shot by and vanished in the gloom, and the clean snow of the
lower valley lay open before it. The creature laid its belly to the
ground and went, the white spray spurting from its heels.
Stark hung on. His strength was gone now, run out suddenly with the
battle-madness. He became conscious now that he was sick and bleeding,
that his body was one cruel pain. In that moment, more than in the hours
that had gone before, he hated the black leader of the clans of Mekh.
That flight down the valley became a sort of ugly dream. Stark was aware
of rock walls reeling past, and then they seemed to widen away and the
wind came out of nowhere like the stroke of a great hammer, and he was
on the open moors again.
The beast began to falter and slow down. Presently it stopped.
Stark scooped up snow to rub on his wounds. He came near to fainting,
but the bleeding stopped and after that the pain was numbed to a dull
ache. He wrapped the cloak around him and urged the beast to go on,
gently this time, patiently, and after it had breathed it obeyed him,
settling into the shuffling pace it could keep up for hours.
He was three days on the moors. Part of the time he rode in a sort of
stupor, and part of the time he was feverishly alert, watching the
skyline. Frequently he took the shapes of thrusting rocks for riders,
and found what cover he could until he was sure they did not move. He
was afraid to dismount, for the beast had no bridle. When it halted to
rest he remained upon its back, shaking, his brow beaded with sweat.
The wind scoured his tracks clean as soon as he made them. Twice, in the
distance, he did see riders, and one of those times he burrowed into a
tall drift and stayed there for several hours.
The ruined towers marched with him across the bitter land, lonely giants
fifty miles apart. He did not go near them.
He knew that he wandered a good bit, but he could not help it, and it
was probably his salvation. In those tortured badlands, riven by ages of
frost and flood, one might follow a man on a straight track between two
points. But to find a single rider lost in that wilderness was a matter
of sheer luck, and the odds were with Stark.
One evening at sunset he came out upon a plain that sloped upward to a
black and towering scarp, notched with a single pass.
The light was level and blood-red, glittering on the frosty rock so that
it seemed the throat of the pass was aflame with evil fires. To Stark's
mind, essentially primitive and stripped now of all its acquired reason,
that narrow cleft appeared as the doorway to the dwelling place of
demons as horrible as the fabled creatures that roam the Darkside of his
native world.
He looked long at the Gates of Death, and a dark memory crept into his
brain. Memory of that nightmare experience when the talisman had made
him seem to walk into that frightful pass, not as Stark, but as Ban
Cruach.
He remembered Otar's words--_I have seen Ban Cruach the mighty_. Was he
still there beyond those darkling gates, fighting his unimagined war,
alone?
Again, in memory, Stark heard the evil piping of the wind. Again, the
shadow of a dim and terrible shape loomed up before him....
He forced remembrance of that vision from his mind, by a great effort.
He could not turn back now. There was no place to go.
His weary beast plodded on, and now Stark saw as in a dream that a great
walled city stood guard before that awful Gate. He watched the city
glide toward him through a crimson haze, and fancied he could see the
ages clustered like birds around the towers.
He had reached Kushat, with the talisman of Ban Cruach still strapped in
the blood-stained belt around his waist.