“Whitetip, a very large wolf got into the city last night and killed and ate a young woman. The hounds seem afraid to try to track the wolf from the place where it slew and ate. How is your nose this morning? I need to know just where it came across the walls.”
“I come, brother,” beamed the cat.
But when the monstrous feline had sniffed at the place whereon the killer had obviously lain—this fact attested by the presence of several coarse, reddish-brown hairs stuck in a thin smear of dried blood—he wrinkled his nose and beamed, “Are you certain this was done by a wolf, brother chief? It smells like no wolf I’ve ever scented. Like no other animal, for that matter.”
“Could it have been a man, cat brother, laying false paw prints, perhaps?” In Harzburk, Bili recalled, a man had once tried to conceal a murder by dumping the body in a forest, then stamping around and about the corpse while wearing a pair of wooden-soled boots cunningly carved to resemble the feet of a bear. But that malefactor had been apprehended before he could burn the telltale boots, had confessed under torture and was then impaled in the central square of the burk.
“No, brother,” the big cat demurred. “While there is the vague hint of man smell to it, there is mostly something else, not really twoleg, not Kleesahk at all, but not really an animal smell, either. It is simply beyond my experience.”
“Well, can you at least follow it, cat brother?” asked the young commander. “Scent it to where it left the city?”
“I think I can,” agreed the cat, “unless there is more than the single trail to follow.”
But the prairiecat did lose the trail at a point near the palace kitchens where some scullions had recently dumped pails of inedible slops and soapy water to allow them to run out the drain that pierced the corner of the curtain wall.
Bili gazed up at the nearly nine feet of smooth wall critically. “Well, I suppose it’s possible—just barely possible—that the beast, whatever it is, could have jumped that high, gotten onto the battlements. But where could it have gone from there? Nowhere, unless it has wings. That’s a good hundred-foot drop, and the cliffs too sheer for anything bigger than a lizard or maybe a mouse to find purchase.”
Once again, there was no answer.
The big Ganik bully, Horseface Charley, had crept into the spot earlier decided upon just before dawn. Now he lay well concealed beneath an overhang of rock, his hands, face, hair, beard and clothing all oiled, then heavily sprinkled with rock dust and streaked with soot, his rifle similarly dulled. With him in his burrow under the overhang were a skin of watered wine, a quantity of Skohshun hard bread and jerked beef, a handful of dried fruit and a plug of chewing tobacco. But aside from his rifle and forty rounds of ammunition, he had brought along only its hanger-like bayonet and his belt knife—he was not there to fight, only to kill.
The slope on which he was situated was steep and the rocks he had piled before him not only helped to conceal him and his burrow but provided a rest for the rifle that was rock-steady in every sense of that phrase. As the sun rose, those piled rocks and the overhang combined to keep the burrow relatively dim and cool for the big man who lay on his belly, the rifle stock cradled against his right shoulder, sighting up the length of the barrel at one of the armored figures standing on the battlements of the main wall some five hundred meters distant up the steep hill.
The upper part of a body clad in cuirass and open-faced helmet leaned out in the crenel between two massive merlons, apparently to shout something to someone of the garrison of the barbican, then lingered as if awaiting an answer. In the interval, Horseface Charley settled the rifle’s buttplate solidly against his clavicle, pressed his bearded cheek to the dusty stock sighted carefully and slowly squeezed the trigger. The rifle roared and slammed the butt into his shoulder with considerable force. Horseface kept his keen eyes fixed on his target while he rapidly operated the bolt of the rifle, ejecting the smoking brass case and jacking a live round into the chamber of the piece. For a long moment, it seemed that his shot might have missed, but then the distant figure disappeared from the crenel far more quickly than it had appeared, as if jerked by a hidden rope.
Horseface Charley smiled contentedly to himself, worked his wad of tobacco around into another spot and began to sight up at another target.
Bili had barely returned to his palace office when the frantic mindcall came from Lieutenant Kahndoot. “Brother, one of the engineers, here on the top of the gate tower, has been killed. There is a smallish hole over one of his eyes and it seems that his head for some reason flew into pieces inside his helmet.”
Half out of the sweat-soggy canvas pourpoint, Bili worked his arms back into the sleeves and thrust his head through the neck opening, called back the serving men to help him back into the just-removed armor. Two mysterious deaths in one morning, he thought wryly, were more than he cared for.
Accompanied by Sir Yoo Folsom, Captain Fil Tyluh and two guardsmen, Bili strode the length of the west wall and was just putting foot to the stairs that would take him up onto the top of the corner tower, when Kahndoot’s mindspeak came again. “Brother, two more have been slain in the same manner as was the first. Take care when you come not to expose yourself anywhere on the front wall. Both of these others died there.”
Bili briefly recounted what he had been told by Kahndoot’s telepathy, then he and the other four men entered the door to the low-ceilinged tower room, squeezed their way between the piles of catapult boulders, commodious siege quivers of darts, arrows and quarrels, racks of assorted polearms, bags of slingstones, forked shafts for pushing over scaling ladders and other impedimenta, to emerge at the similar doorway that opened onto the front or south wall. At a crouching run, they crossed to the open door to the gate tower and the waiting Lieutenant Kahndoot.
After Bili had carefully examined the three still-warm corpses, he shrugged, looking up at Kahndoot and his other subordinates. “I would think that we can safely assume that this is the foul work of the Skohshuns, who clearly are up to something down there and so want us to keep our heads down, be less alert than usual. As to precisely what weapon did the actual killing, I can’t say, not without delving into that mess inside those helmets, but I imagine, since no one seems to have seen a slinger, that it was a prod—one of those crossbows that throws stones or leaden pellets. Now, true, I’ve never heard of or seen one of them powerful enough that its projectiles were capable of striking, penetrating with such power as this, but that is not to say that such weapons don’t exist, for upgrading the effect of weapons is—as all of us know—a constant, ongoing process.”
He arose, wiping his hands on the thighs of his trousers. “Lieutenant Kahndoot,” he said aloud for the benefit of Sir Yoo Folsom and those others present who were not mindspeakers, “alert your people to keep as close a watch as possible on all approaches without unnecessarily exposing themselves to that prod or whatever. Come nightfall, I’ll send a couple of the Kleesahks down there to try to find the hiding places of whoever is picking our men off this wall.
“Now, the barbican is, of course, the most vulnerable of all our defenses. Who is the mindspeaker there, this watch?”
“There is not one there, Dook Bili,” said Kahndoot, who was always much more formal orally than telepathically.
“Damn!” His big, bony fist made a sharp crack in the palm of his other hand. “All right, for now, but in future there must always be at least one easily ranged mindspeaker in that barbican, and on every other watch detail, for that matter. For all our obvious advantages, this city still could fall, you know, do we conduct a sloppy, cocksure defense of it.