Sterling Lanier - The Unforsaken Hiero

“I gather you feel the same, Per Sagenay?”

“No-oh,” was the answer, given in equable tones. “Yet you have not asked me to try to read the symbols. This is one of my small talents, and while I will, as Per Maluin has been careful to point out, obey any and all instructions that you care to give us, still I am a little puzzled. No forelooking and no sign that some of the greatest foresters of the North can discern. But you feel that we should linger in this precise spot, as if we awaited something. Perhaps if you shared some of your thoughts with us, we might be able to help.” The soft, clear voice fell silent, and, like Malum, Sagenay lounged back on the bank of moss which shrouded the upthrust of rock behind them.

Hiero stood and stretched, then reseated himself. In the silence that followed, he seemed to be listening to the bird song which welled around them, his eyes for the nonce cast down. Finally he spoke.

“I could tell you all sorts of things, bring up the past, mention that I am a sensitive, and still tell you nothing. I’ll be honest and say I simply don’t know anything. We have been on the trail for almost three weeks. Two days ago, I felt—no other word for it-felt that this area we are in was crucial, that we ought to stay here. I can’t tell you why. I don’t know why. There is inimical life here somewhere; I feel it, I sense it, in some way I can’t explain. There is also something else, Something is coming here. The catfolk don’t see it, you two don’t, nor do the Mantans, who excel all of us combined in woodcraft. But I do! We are at some sort of meeting place. I know it. For years, all of this area has been a blank to the Abbeys. We operate west of it and north of it. To the southeast lies the Palood and the Inland Sea. This angle is unknown. You know all that. I tell you, something is building here. I won’t permit your talent, Per Sagenay, for one reason. The enemy has learned what I could do. We don’t know what they can do, what they could have taught themselves in the past year. One of the things about the talent for forelooking that almost got me killed in the past is that it leaves one’s own mind open. I won’t have it! We are on the verge, the border, of some vast movement. Our business here is to probe it, not to let it know of us at all. I have sensed out and over a wide area. This forest about us is a blank indeed. A mental blank! No such thing should occur. Oh, the younger life, the Grokon, the deer, the hares, all are here. But they are muted, quiescent, and in far fewer numbers than they should be. Only the tiny, innocuous creatures—the birds, the mice, the insects—are in norma! numbers.” He leaned back and rested on one elbow. Then he added, “You will, I fear, have to take me on trust. Something is going to happen here, and we must wait for it.”

It was Sagenay who finished the argument. “Per Desteen, you are the leader. All else is unimportant. Those who spread evil are all about us, and you are not only our commander but our chief warning signal. I have no more to say. Your thoughts are the only ones that matter.”

The quiet voice left an empty space behind it. Maluin grunted several times and then waved one finger at Hiero in mock warning. He, too, settled back, and the three lay silent, staring over the ashes of their tiny fire. Yet all were alert, waiting for anything that would disturb the ether, any trace of trouble, any hint that they were not alone in the seemingly innocent depths of the great continent-wide wood.

All of them were travel-stained and travel-worn. They had marched, a very long way north and east of Namcush to reach this unknown land. Not even the Mantans, veterans of a multitude of journeys in the untracked wilds, had ever roamed these parts. Their only guide now was the instinct of their leader.

Hiero had warned his comrades that they must always stay under the cloak of the trees. He remembered well that not too far to the east, he had first glimpsed and then contacted the flying device which lifted an enemy adept far aloft in the heavens. Since his reports, passed through Brother Aldo, had arrived at the central command post of the Abbeys, much thought and research had been devoted to his warning. As a result, he had some tentative information at his disposal. The thing he had seen was deemed to be an unpowered glider, a concept long lost but recorded in the central files. While its maneuverings in the air were nothing unknown in theory, no one had ever thought of a method of getting such a thing launched and up into the higher atmosphere. This was now being eagerly pursued, but as yet only the foe possessed the secret. And only Hiero had ever seen such a machine, which might mean that it was both rare and difficult to handle.

The afternoon waned. The four cat people groomed themselves and rested, and the men engaged in desultory talk. It was perhaps three hours until sundown, and still nothing disturbed the outward peace of the forest.

The interruption was sudden and silent. Reyn Mantan, his gaunt, swarthy face impassive, stood before them, looking as furtive and stealthy as some silent predator of the wood. His words, as always, were blunt and terse.

“I left Geor alone and circled camp in patrol at noon. I went east to have a scout, widen our range a little.” No one commented that this was not exactly what his orders had been. The Mantan brothers took orders as they found them and interpreted them as they chose. They were proven allies, yet not soldiers, and their experience was too great and too valuable for them to be treated as if they needed constant discipline.

Now, brushing a bed of pine needles aside, Reyn crouched and drew a crude map with his dagger point.

“We’re here, see? I went east and a bit north.” He drew a wavy line. “Here is broken rock mixed with swamp. There’s something in that area, hard to get at. Like a bad smell. I seen something like it once over to the coast.” He meant the Beesee area bordering the great western ocean, far away over the mighty mountains, the Shinies.

“It moves around, something does, in there. I can feel it shifting. Maybe more than one thing. But it don’t seem to come this way at all, only north and south, like it moves up and down in a line. Some kind of border, maybe, and some kind of guard. Want to go have a look?”

The others were on their feet now, and the catfolk had drawn closer, attracted by the excitement.

“What was the place on the coast like?” Maluin rapped. “Why do you think this is the same or at least similar?”

“Hard to tell. The place over west was more like a circle, a blotch, but there’s the same feel to it here. Like a stink you can’t smell. Bad feeling. We didn’t go into it then, me and Geor. Only a few Inyan camps in that area, and they didn’t go nowhere near the place. Too scared. If we hadn’t been in a hurry then, we might have tried. Up to you folks what you want done. I only tell what I seen.”

Hiero thought hard. One of the greatest forest rangers of the North had found something inexplicable and was conveying his dislike of it. The man might not be a telepath of any kind, but his countless forays against the Unclean must have honed every sense he possessed to a razor’s edge in the process. Like a stink you can’t smell! What better way of describing some emanation of the enemy? Perhaps even a mental evil which the untutored but alert woodsrunner could only dimly detect. Hiero made up his mind quickly.

“Call your brother in and well march. Make it slow. Reyn, you lead out. No one use the mind touch at all!” He explained in a few thoughts to the Children of the Wind what he wanted, and they moved off in moments. All that had to be done was to don the light packs and adjust weapons more comfortably. This was a group which was never off guard or unready for an instant alert.