He shook his head until his mane of hair near blinded him with its fringe across bright eyes.
“You are neither one thing nor the other, you who call yourself Kerovan. Learn what you are, and that speedily, or you shall be reduced to nothing at all—not even bones left to dry in desert air.”
Such was the farewell the lord of the Wereriders took of me, for I was not invited to be a guest under that bush roof. I had been offered no greeting cup when I came, no stirrup cup when I left. It was as if here I was less considered than even the most humble of landsmen. I did not allow my temper to take edge from that, for I was not wishful to remain longer in a place where I could never be sure which shape those about me wore was theirs in truth.
The sun was well west when I came forth into the clearing in which that half-living keep stood. None of the Wereriders had gathered to see me off. Only he who called himself Herrel followed me out, to mount again, and stood waiting to escort me from their holding. Perhaps in some way they were as suspicious of me as I was of them. My last sight of the keep showed me that the branches that clothed its upper stories were waving as energetically as if storm-tossed, while from them numerous small shapes sprang outward, heading in great racing leaps for the wood. Did they go to hunt by night, I wondered, as I trudged beside Herrel’s shadow-dappled mount? Or were they to form another part of my escort? I sensed in them a source of peril I did not understand, but thought it prudent that I be wary of them.
Once more we threaded that path through the wood. This time the gloom had deepened until now and then I stumbled, half-blinded by the dusk, though neither Herrel nor his mount had any difficulty in keeping the trail. It crossed my mind that those of the feline breed had excellent night sight, so that this man who could will to be a furred, fanged hunter on four paws might well share that sense.
I speculated, as we went in silence, as to how it might feel to be a shapechanger, to taste at desire another kind of life far divorced from that I myself awoke to each morning. Did the instincts and thoughts of a man remain alive in the mind of the beast, or were such dulled and forgotten after one endured the change? Was there in truth a real alteration of body, or was that only a forceful hallucination which the Weres were able to impress upon others? Had I indeed seen Hyron as an actual stallion ready to savage me. or just what I was meant to see?
So musing, I tried to recall such legends of the Weres as the Dalesmen knew. But all our stories were so old, so overlaid with the horror of people who had faced such a mixture of nature, that I really knew very little. I would have liked to have questioned Herrel—asked him what it meant to he two different natures fused into one. In my own way was I not this also? Did he ever consider himself so apart from normal mankind as to be cursed, walled off from any small pleasure of life? No—that burden would not touch one who walked among his own kin, who had the comradeship of those who shared his own talent, if one could call it that. Also I knew better than to ask such questions of a stranger.
Our winding path so disguised the length of the journey that I was not sure how close we were to the outermost part of the tree wall when there came a thin, high chittering from the left. It was the first sound other than the faint thud of hooves and the scarcely heard pad of my own feet to break the silence.
“Wait!” Herrel reined up.
I, who was behind him on the narrow path, obeyed his order. He leaned forward, his head turned a little toward the nearest of the tree branches.
Again, imperative, came that sound. I heard Herrel whistle—not that command note that he had used to stay the panic of my horses, but rather as if he summoned.
From the branch toward which he had been looking sprang a small creature, certainly of the same species as those abiding in the roof of the Were keep. It balanced on the Were’s shoulder and gave a series of sharp squeaks, as if it spoke to him in its own tongue.
At last he held out his arm and the creature ran along it with the sureness it might have used on a stout branch, leaped out, vanishing in the walling mass of green. Herrel looked to me.
“Thas,” he said tersely.
“Here?” Though I still did not know the nature of that enemy, the reaction of the Weres earlier had made very plain this was a threat even they respected, not to be taken lightly.
“At your camp.” He prodded his mount from a walk to a trot, so that I must run to keep up. However, it was only a very short time before we burst free into the open land. There was more light here—much more, for the western sky was striped with color. Only, what I looked upon was such an area of disaster as made me think for a moment that I was the victim of hallucination.
The ground where I had made my camp was now a raw mass of new cut ruts and hollows, of great circular scare, laying bare piles of soil. Where my horses had grazed there were no animals, while from the broken ground there arose a stench of foul decay strong enough to make me gag.
Down on his knees in the midst of that churned and torn sod was a man in Dalesman’s armor hacking at the earth with heavy jabs of his sword, sending broken clods flying in all directions. At his side a woman, also wearing mail but without any helm on her dark head, used the edge of a small arm shield to aid in the frantic digging.
As we broke from the wood, and I ran toward that mass, she glanced up—then reached to catch the arm of the sword user. The man turned his head to note us, but he did not pause in his digging. It might have been that any halt in his labor could be, for some reason, fatal.
The woman arose to her feet, shaking free a scoopful of earth she held in the shield. There was light enough to see her face clearly, and I was startled, for there was that in it I recognized—though I could not have set name to her. I felt, as I had not ever before in my life, that her kind was kin—to me who had no kin. Was she another inhabitant of the Waste, but closer to man in heritage than Herrel and his kind?
She spoke as I came up to her, not to me, rather to the man still digging.
“There is no longer any use, Jervon. She is lost to us.”
She then turned to eye Herrel and to him also she spoke, sharply, as one who had the right to demand answers.
“Warrior, what manner of peril is it that can turn solid earth into a whirlpool and engulf a traveler so? Who casts such a Power spell and for what purpose?”
He continued to sit his mount, though he met her gaze squarely, a faint frown on his face.
“Thas,” he replied.
“And what are Thas—or could it be who?” she persisted, with the same tone of command.
“Deep earth dwellers. The inner parts of the ground are theirs. It is their given talent to command it to their desires when they wish. As to why they set such a trap here—” He shrugged. “The Waste holds divers species, we go our own ways, following the demands of our natures. Though this is the truth: it has not been known for many seasons that the Thas venture outward from the mountains where lie their chosen burrows. Though they may well have delved so without our knowing of it, they run their ways very deep. Also, we of the Waste meddle not among ourselves.” His answer was chill, as if he meant it as a reproof for her persistence, her open questioning of a matter he plainly thought was none of her concern.
She stepped across a deep rut, advanced closer to him. Her companion had arisen, his soil-encrusted sword still in hand. I had seen his like in the Dales, for he was plainly a man of that pure blood. Though he wore a helm, it carried no House badge. Still there was nothing about him that proclaimed “outlaw.”
“These burrows, which the Thas run for their purposes,” the woman continued, “how deeply may such lie and where?”
Herrel shrugged again. “Who knows? Or cares. We have never had any traffic with the earth-dwellers—their ways are not ours.”