He no more than said it than there came a loud slippage and dark rush of dust and shale past them, and beasts bawled and shied in a cascade of fragments.
One of the pack beasts had fallen, and took his burden with him, sliding all the way down to the bottom. It flailed and bawled and could not rise from its burden, and it remained a sobering example of a misstep until they could make the long descent and deal with it.
The beast when they reached it had broken bones, and had to be killed: Bosginde did that with a quick stroke and covered the blood-soaked shale with shovelfuls of dry sand, where he could scrape enough together for the purpose.
The water bags had not broken. None of the supplies was lost, except a tent’s deep-irons, which lay far up on the unstable slope, in plain sight, but Tofi ruled against sending anyone up, no matter the value.
“We can cut the beast up for meat,” the potter said. “We can take the best.”
“No,” Hati said fiercely. “Leave it all. Leave all the gear. Let us move. We may have saved those three fools, but we may lose ourselves if we stand staring!”
There was that feeling in the wind. There was disaster about the whole day, and Tofi gave the order to the slaves to apportion out the packs and get them all moving.
Even so, the first crawling vermin appeared among the rocks before they had gotten the packs redistributed.
“What is that?” Norit asked, looking around her. There was a scrabbling in the rocks, a snarl of combat. “What’s that?”
“A feast in the desert gains too many guests,” Marak said. They had followed a blood trail. With the letting of the blood from the beast’s wounds, they had the raw meat smell about them. It carried far on the desert wind: even a man could smell it. Carrying pack items that might have blood on them had risk, once the carrion-eaters gathered.
Haste, the voices said to him, no delay. No waiting.
The storm would have driven the vermin to cover, and to hunger, and the rearrangement of the land would drive some of the smallest out of their ranges. The whole path of the storm might be unsettled, and that storm track took shape in the back of Marak’s mind the way the shape of the storm had appeared in the images. He sensed desperation in the circling predators. He cursed himself for a fool not having anticipated that Foragi might have been already past reason.
One need not fear the strongest beast on the Lakht, that was the proverb. The strongest would take the carcass. But the weak were gathering, too, and they might follow the second choice. He saw the sky over them gathering with ten and twenty and thirty of the vermin.
“Hurry,” Tofi said to the slaves, as they went about the work with the packs. “You’ll be first and afoot if the vermin come on us! Move, you sons of damnation!”
The first of the flying and the crawling vermin arrived and began worrying at the carcass with them only a stone’s throw away. Another few sent down a shower of shale fragments, coming down the slide.
The quick and the desperate came first. They were not the strongest, only the earliest, the most opportunistic, harbinger of what else would come. They growled and tore into the carcass and the scent of blood and then entrails grew in the air.
“Hurry!” Hati said.
“A’ip!” Tofi yelled. “Ya! a’ip!” The beast the slaves were loading stood trembling, and without complaint, when she gave a jerk on its lead.
More of the flying vermin had landed.
And a glance off across the land showed a furtive, eye-deceiving movement as if the land itself had come to life.
Marak saw Norit into the saddle, delayed to assist Tofi’s women while Tofi railed on his slaves. Osan had gotten up onto his feet.
He did not delay then to make Osan kneel again. He seized the rein, jumped, and seized the saddle, hauling himself up by brute strength until he put a foot in the mounting loop, a move he had doubted he could do. Osan was moving before he could land in the saddle and tuck his leading foot into place. Tofi scrambled up, and the slaves mounted in desperate haste, the pack beasts tethered in line and each trying to move at once.
Osan quickened his pace, flicking his ears in distress, laying them back at what he smelled. The beasts knew what the nomads of the Lakht knew, what Hati had foretold. Marak himself had never seen a mobbing… few in the Lakht had seen it and lived.
The beasts picked up their pace, treading heedlessly, crushing small vermin that chanced underfoot, creatures hardly more than a hand’s length. The mobbing started on that scale, other creatures turning toward the smell of death near at hand, already beginning to gorge and being bitten and clawed by other creatures nearby.
In an instant what had begun as a flattened multipede became a fist-sized ball of struggling eaters that grew larger by the moment.
All that hunger, Marak thought, only a day or so out from the rich oasis of Pori. And the storm had churned it to madness of a different kind, a natural frenzy.
The beshti hit a traveling run, a difficult pace for the unhabituated, and next to a flat-out bolt, which might fling the weak riders from the saddle. Marak held Osan back, and crossed him in front of Tofi’s men, who were about to break ahead.
“Don’t wear them down,” he said sharply. Hati pulled in front with the same advice, and they slowed the impulse toward outright flight. At a moderate pace they reached sand that no longer moved.
Then they counted themselves truly escaped, and fortunate.
They did not overtake Malin and the ex-soldiers.
They did not camp at noon, either. They kept going with minor rests, taking a little of the dried fruit for their meal, and a little water, enduring the heat of the sun, and even the beasts did not complain. The distance between them and the disturbance still seemed perilously scant, the beasts still were skittish, and they rode until they had put the whole afternoon behind them.
Then they settled down for a shortened rest, with no tents pitched, lying on their mats until the stars came out.
In the distance a hunter howled, and most all the still bodies in the camp roused and turned and looked toward that horizon.
So did the beasts, lifting their heads in perfect unison.
Marak saw nothing but a flat, endless, wind-scoured land.
He let his head back and trusted the beasts to raise a fuss if danger came close. The voices urged him, pleaded with him, Hurry, hurry, hurry! even now, and rest came hard.
Fear was on the wind tonight. The tower built itself, and the cave of suns was in it, and he heard voices multiplying.
Then he gained the strangest notion that he should get up, and take his beast and keep traveling.
Certain of the sleeping madmen sat up, too. Hati had gotten to her feet, and then Norit, who plunged her head into her hands and shook her head, refusing the vision, perhaps, or perhaps only weary beyond words.
The beasts themselves, not being mad, could not sustain such a pace. But after all the fright and terror of the day, still, the mad rose up, not listening, locked in that intensity of purpose that drove men to walk to their deaths.
Malin and the soldiers had been the first.
“No,” Marak said. He went to them, seized one arm and the other, and shook at them. “Wake up. Don’t follow it afoot like Malin and Kassan. You saw what happened with the beast. You know what happened to those that walked out. In a few hours we will go. But not straggling off by twos and threes like fools! Listen to me!”
Two heard him. The orchardman began to walk, and the potter followed.
He caught the orchardman and hit him hard with his, fist, pitching the man down. He overtook the potter, a slighter man, and hit him, the same. The man went down unconscious, and that was the end of his walking off in the night.
The orchardman sat nursing a bloody lip and muttering to himself, but sane enough with the pain of a chipped tooth to know he had been a fool.
Marak went back with a sore hand and sat down to suck at a cut knuckle.