The Three Ladies are Skaith's crowning beauty, in fact her only one—three magnificent star-clusters that grace the moonless sky, shedding a light more sweet and silvery than Old Sun's rusty glare, but almost as bright. Darkness is hard to come by on Skaith, even at night.
It did not much matter now. Darkness would not save them from the hoppers.
They found more clumps of twisted thorn, shadowed and tempting. Stark ignored them. A low ridge rose to the right, silhouetted against the distant glow around Arkeshti. Stark ignored that, too. He stayed on the open, exposed slope. Not much of a slope, but enough to have carried off superficial drainage in the rainy season.
The throb of the motors changed. The hoppers were airborne.
"Here," Stark said, thrusting Ashton down into a barely perceptible wrinkle in the ground.
He tore up clods of grass and flowers and strewed them over Ashton, enough to break up the visual aspect of a human body. He spoke a single word to Ashton, a click-cough sound that meant freeze. Then he slid away up to the ridge.
From there he observed a great deal of activity around the ship. Men with lights were already on the heath, beating back and forth; and others were coming to join them, searching for dead or wounded bodies.
Up above them, the four hoppers had switched on their powerful landing beams. They swept out into a long line, rushing ahead of the men. Their loud-hailers boomed and belled, an unnatural baying like the voices of some strange breed of mechanized hound hot on the scent. Bolts from their laser cannon struck downward and clumps of thorn erupted into dust and flame.
Stark left the ridge in haste. He found another shallow fold in the slope, not enough to conceal a rabbit, but he dug himself in with his fingers as best he could and lay still among the grass and flowers.
The roar of the hoppers filled the sky, sweeping back and forth, pounding the coverts flat. One of the hoppers paused over the gully, shining down its white glare, pulverizing the shadows with flaring lightning bolts. The loud-hailer shouted Stark's name, then laughed. Stark thought the voice was Penkawr-Che's, but the metallic distortion was such that he could not be sure. The thorn thickets which had seemed to offer such tempting concealment went up, one after the other, in a rage of flame.
The fires and the edges of the landing beams lit up the slope clearly enough even without the Lady's cluster light. Stark lay and listened to the pounding of his own heart, and prayed that Ashton could lie as still as he, and as long; the hunters would be alert for movement. Habitually, Stark knew from the experience of a lifetime, they looked for two things: cover where the quarry may be hiding, or the quarry itself, caught in the open, running. They seldom looked too closely where there is neither cover nor movement, no place to hide, nothing to see. That was why Stark had chosen to remain in the open.
But the price of invisibility is complete lack of motion. Once the quarry stirs, it is lost.
A pair of yellow birds forgot that axiom. Panicked by the noise and flames, they broke and rushed diagonally upward across the slope. The loud-hailer hallooed, and a laser bolt—in massive overkill—crisped them to cinders.
The hopper hung, swinging about, questing. Apparently Ashton did not stir, for nothing else caught its attention and it roared on to devour fresh ground. Stark continued to lie without moving. Loose dirt trickled from the clods with which he had camouflaged himself. Small disturbed things crawled on him. Some of them bit. The dark-eyed flowers peered this way and that in wild disarray; perhaps the air currents generated by the hopper were responsible. There was a smell of smoke in the air. Fire was spreading out from the thorn thickets, and the shot that killed the birds had set the grass alight. Stark could hear the crackling, entirely too close for comfort. He tried to assess the degree of dryness of the grass, hoping the flames would not spread too quickly. The line of search was drawing away, but the hoppers were bound to come back. It was too soon to move.
The flowers looked down at him from around his face. They looked over him at the fires. They looked upward at the sky. Certainly flowers did not see, but they might have other sensors. They also had a faint sticky fragrance that became more insistent as Stark breathed it, even under the taint of smoke. He also had the unpleasant sensation that the grass crept against him like a sentient thing, touching him with its blades. He had a very great desire to be on his feet again, and away from this too-great intimacy.
Smoke began to blow across him. He forgot his other discomforts in the effort not to cough, and he believed the crackling sound was louder. Little puffs of heat touched his skin.
The hoppers, having gone well past the point where their quarry might have run, wheeled round. They went more slowly on the way back, rummaging leisurely about the ruined landscape, making sure they had left no cover where a man might live. One of them came across the slope and speared Stark in the direct glare of the landing beam.
He held his breath, and shut his eyes, lest they catch the light and shine. Smoke rolled across him—and that was good in one way—but he could feel the heat of the ground now with his feet. In a few moments the flames would be all around him. The grass and the flowers knew it, too; he had no further doubt that they were in some manner aware and cringing. He grappled with the panic that rose within him and held it down; then, after a lazy eternity, the hopper droned on over the ridge, back toward Arkeshti.
Even so, Stark did not move until he could smell the soles of his boots smoldering. Then he had no further choice. Still in the thick smoke, he bolted out of his shallow grave and hurried along to where he had left Ashton, knowing that if another hopper chanced by they would have no hope.
The fire had not yet spread near to Ashton, who had not moved. He rose up stiffly when Stark bent over him, and was obliged to stamp about in order to loosen his muscles.
"When I used to go hunting with the abos," he said wryly, "I was somewhat younger. Otherwise, Four-Paws would have eaten me." He shivered. "That last one was too close for comfort! Thank God for the smoke."
They set off, away from the ship, threading their way between fires and over patches of scorched ground. They heard no further sound of motors in the sky. Having stamped the land flat, the hunters could assume that the quarry had perished in one or another of the flaming coverts.
Presently Stark and Ashton were beyond the perimeter of the fires. They kept on until it became apparent that Ashton, who had not had an easy day, was beginning to flag. Stark found a thicket, made sure that nothing laired in it, and sat down so the thorn-trees guarded his back. Penkawr-Che's poisons were still in his blood, so he was glad of the rest.
The flowers had marked their passage. Long ripples ran across them, streaming far away, out of sight; but there was nothing strange in this except that the ripples ran crosswise to the wind.
Ashton said, "Eric, when I was lying there pretending not to exist, with the grass and flowers close against me, I got the feeling that—"
"So did I. There's some kind of sentience there. Maybe the sort of thing that tells a Venus flytrap when to snap shut."
"Do you suppose they're carrying a message? And if so, to whom?"
The heath stretched away on all sides, tilting toward the horizon, rough and rumpled, dotted with the twisted thickets and occasional blasted trees. Stark lifted his head and quartered the wind, scenting strangeness, scenting nothing welcoming to man. The faint and somehow treacherous sweetness of the flowers—endless miles of them—caught in his throat. There was nothing in all that emptiness to catch the eye, and yet he sensed presences, things awake and knowing. Whether these were human, animal, or quite other, he could not tell.
He did not like it. "I'll be glad to leave this upland," he said, "and by the quickest way."
"That's the way we just came," said Ashton. "Penkawr-Che picked his spot because the hoppers can raid down into the jungle on about a 180-degree perimeter without having to go much more than a hundred miles in any direction. Eventually, the other two ships, which are raiding elsewhere, will rendezvous with him and they'll head north together to see if they can crack that treasure-house under the Witchfires. How much did you have to tell him?"
"Not as much as he wanted. With luck, he might find that balcony within half a year." Stark frowned. "I don't know . . . The Diviners said that I would bring more blood to the House of the Mother. That's why they tried so hard to kill me. Well, they must fight their battles. We've got one of our own to worry about." He swept his hand across the limitless horizon. "We can't go eastward because of Penkawr-Che. Otherwise, we have a free choice. Any suggestions?"
"Pedrallon."
"What about Pedrallon?"
"He's a prince in his own country. His people bought him back from Penkawr-Che. He has position and power—"
"Unless his people decided to feed him to Old Sun for his sins."
"I suppose it's possible, but he's the only person I can think of who might help us, and who is also located where we might conceivably reach him. Andapell lies along the coast somewhere southwest of here."
"How far?"
"I don't know. But we could strike for the coast and perhaps get passage on a ship. Or, failing that, steal a boat."
"The last time I saw Pedrallon," said Stark, "he had very little use for off-worlders even though he was intriguing with them for his own ends. He will have even less use for them now."
"I came to know him quite well, Eric. There was a lot of time aboard ship, while Penkawr-Che was making up his mind whether to take us to Pax and be satisfied with the payment he'd been promised, or to gamble on his heaven-sent opportunity to loot a world. I think I gave Pedrallon a better understanding of what the Galactic Union is and how it works, and I think he came rather to like me as an individual. Also, he is a dedicated man, to the point of fanaticism. He swore he would go on fighting the Wandsmen, even though his hopes of ever achieving the freedom of starflight are gone. He might even find us useful."
"A faint hope, Simon."
"Worse than faint. But do we have another?" Stark brooded. "Irnan has nothing left to fight with. Tregad and the other city-states are an unknown quantity. They may go either way. In any case, as you say, they're out of reach." He shrugged. "It might as well be Andapell."
Stark let Ashton sleep for an hour. During that time he rattled around the thicket and, by dint of tearing his hands painfully, managed to fashion two clubs from thorn-wood, snapped to the proper length beneath his boot heel. When he could find the right kind of shattered stone, he would be able to provide hand axes or knife-blades as well. In the meantime, the clubs were a comfort.
The heath was without landmarks, a country in which a man might easily lose himself and wander until he died, unless something took him first, and unaware. Here in the outer reaches of the galaxy the starfields were thin, but Stark found enough old friends to set a course by. When he roused Ashton, they headed west and south, away from Arkeshti, hoping to reach the rim of the upland, where it dropped down to the jungle that lay between it and the sea. Neither one had any idea how far that rim might be.
But Stark remembered how, months before, he and Ashton had set out together from the Citadel, far in the bitter north, two men alone on a hostile planet. Then, they had had weapons and supplies, and beasts of burden—and they had had the Northhounds. Now they were destitute, and all the labors of that earlier journey had been brought to nothing by the treachery of one man.
Stark's bitterness was not alleviated by the knowledge that he himself had made the arrangements with Penkawr-Che.
With all the persuasion of his considerable wealth, the Wandsman Pedrallon had not been able to talk the Antarean into getting involved in Skaith's problems beyond providing a transceiver and keeping a speculative finger on the pulse of things. Only Stark's last-minute intervention, when the starport was already in flames and the ships in the act of departure, had tipped the scales, along with his mention of Ashton's rescue and the rewards to be won by Penkawr-Che through taking him and the delegations to Galactic Center. Stark could not have known what sort of man Penkawr-Che was, and in any case the Antarean had been the only hope available. But these thoughts made Stark no happier now.
He glanced sidelong at his foster-father, who ought by now to have been almost within sight of Pax and his office at the Ministry of Planetary Affairs.
"It comes to my mind, Simon," he said, "that if all I saved you for was to walk Skaith perpetually like some landbound Flying Dutchman, I might better have left you with the Lords Protector, where at least your captivity was comfortable."
"As long as my legs hold out," said Ashton, "I'd rather walk."
The flowers watched them, rippling. The last of the Three Ladies rose, adding her silvery light to that of her sisters. The heath was flooded with gentle radiance.
Nevertheless, the night seemed very dark.