Avram Davidson - The Kar-Chee Reign

Behind they could hear Gaspar still shrieking out his insane petition. Then, abruptly, his voice dropped, and he declared, quite calmly. “Let them run; from the Manifestations of Nature there can be no escape for long… Devils, Lej and I will step aside so as not to impede you in your pursuit: but spare the others above — or at least spare those of them who…”

Distance, and the noise of their own running feet and the strident ululation, prevented the fugitives from hearing the rest of his comments. And then came a sound which broke their stride — and then another which brought them to a halt: Gaspar’s voice, raised in one long and incredulous vocable of protest; and overwhelming that, Lej’s voice, raised beyond a pitch they would have thought possible, in terror…

And in pain…

Rickar’s eyes bulged; his mouth swept back into a grim and almost skeletal grin; he half-turned. Tom and Liam grabbed him, Lors pulled, Duro pushed, and they all fled once more; and now their pace flagged never.

When they saw the light of outside day, looking strange and pale, ahead through the rift in the curtain of rock, Tom-small it was who stopped to offer his first word of advice. His chest labored and shone with sweat, and his voice was faint; his gesturing hand trembled.

“If… if… if we have a firehead… should… shouldn’t we…”

Block off the passage behind them? — so Liam understood him. He drew a shuddering breath and shook his head. They fled on, staggering, stumbling, not daring to stop: fleeing through the dying day like animals who dare not pause to look back for sight of the hounds they can no longer hear…

Later, long later, when they had found refuge in a blind cave whose entrance they had closed by moving boulders across its narrow opening, then Liam, when he had caught his breath, explained his reasons.

“We don’t know that they knew that was the way we came in,” he said, throat still burning and lungs still aching. “For another thing, it wouldn’t keep them from getting out. They know other ways out. But… us?… do we know any other ways in? ”

Rickar seemed not to have heard him. His head was cocked and he seemed straining to hear something else; his face still bore signs of the rictus which had seized it at the sound of what might have been his father’s death-cry. Might: then again, might not: and perhaps they all had visions of Gaspar, stripped of clothes and faith and dignity and subjected to the cruel sport of the man-ring — baited and bloody…

Lors parted his sodden hair with his hands, too tired even to toss his head to clear his eyes. “ ‘Any other ways in? ’ ” he repeated, aghast. “Are you as mad as those two were? By my mother’s milk, what could ever bring us back in again?”

Duro said, “Don’t say ‘us.’ ”

And Tom added, “No, don’t. Not me. Never.”

But Lors, still facing Liam, and with a rising and incredulous inflection in his voice, asked, “What do you think of going back for?”

Liam said, his hands roaming aimlessly, nervously, among his sweaty body-hair, “I don’t know… I don’t know that I think of — But I don’t know that I don’t.” Then, less reflectively and more than a little more personally, eying each of them in turn, he declared, “And anyone who doesn’t feel up to going wherever I go is free to go — well, somewhere else… I haven’t twisted any arms,” he concluded, resentfully.

There was silence, broken only by their still laboring breaths. Lors broke it. “We’ve been going where you went,” he pointed out, “not because we were bound to you by oaths or had lost to you in a game of forfeits or owed you a hereditary allegiance, or any of those things… anything like that… no…

“We went with you because you had a sound purpose in mind, so we thought… so I, at least, still am thinking. To find out more about the Devils: wasn’t that our purpose? All right, then. So suppose we just consider together and see what we’ve learned about them — before we either forswear ourselves never to go back or start getting ready to go back right now. Eh? Duro? Tom? Agreed? Well, then…Liam?”

Liam noticed the omission of Rickar, but a swift glance at that one confirmed that he might as well be omitted, at least for the moment. Certainly it looked not only as though Gaspar’s son were not listening to what they were saying, but as though he were incapable of doing so.

“Agreed, then,” he said. And he lifted his head, cleared his throat.

What had they learned about the Devils?

For one thing, they had learned that Kar-chee and dragon were not always found together; although they had seen both on the surface and in the cavern where the serpent-drills had been at work coring and sampling, they had seen only Kar-chee in the great cylindrical pit. What did this prove? Or, if it proved nothing, did it at least hint at something? That the dragons were not essential to the basic tasks of the Kar-chee and served only as, or chiefly as, a sort of army or watch-force?

Further — they had seen the great ships with which the Kar-chee (and, one must assume, the dragons, too) rode the air… and, according to some legends, the airless spaces in between the stars. They had seen these ships damaged, whence it followed that they were damageable. And they had seen the Kar-chee at work repairing them. And what this showed was certainly more than just a possible hint—

“You mean that they want to get away?” asked Lors.

“I mean that they want to be able to get away! I mean that they don’t look as though they’ve come to stay,” Liam replied.

But even as he stated this deduction so clearly and so definitely, a doubt nibbled at the edges and corners of it. The nibbling doubt went round and round, and round and round, and — curious! — try as he would, he could see no other motion to it, nor could he get it to stop so that he could look at it and see clearly what it was…

“Anything wrong?” Lors asked, giving him an alert glance.

Liam roused himself. “No… no… not really. Well, to go on, then—”

To go on, they had had confirmed by their own eyes the information which Liam could have given them from his own experience in Britland: that men at arms were capable of physically destroying Kar-chee. It now remained to be seen whether or not this destruction would be followed by immediate attack — as it had been in New North Britland from Uist to Ulst.

“But I have the notion that it just might not be,” he said.

Rickar muttered; they looked at him, quickly, then at each other. Duro shifted his weight from one haunch to another, asked, “Why not?”

“Because they would have acted after our first attack on them, they would have tried to avenge the death of the first two Kar-chee we killed… or… if they weren’t sure that they were dead, wouldn’t they have tried to rescue them? Still — We haven’t learned much about them, whatever we have learned. Their notions of responsibility one to the other may not be the same as ours. On the other hand, remember how they reacted down there in the pit? Who could have predicted that? Was it only because there we were striking so close to home?”

The cave was dark and small and smelled of bat-mould and drying sweat. It seemed a strange place to be discussing, with almost academic detachment, the psychology of an alien race… and yet the fate of this whole island and all of mankind who dwelt upon it might very well have been hanging upon this discussion.

Liam said he wasn’t sure what the reason was, but he thought it might well be that the Kar-chee were devoting all their energies to repairing their ships so that they could get soon away. And maybe they had been roused to frenzy out of fear that the invading humans were somehow capable of further injuring the Kar-chee ships.