Zinga measured the cloud spread again. "I'd like more to reach that ledge where you came to. Flame bats! It's getting dark. Wish I had Rolth's night eyes."
It was darkening fast and the rising wind swept under the boat so that it lurched as it might on pounding sea waves. Kartr clung to the edge of his seat, his nails biting into its cover.
"Wait!" He got the word out at the risk of a bitten tongue as the lifeboat bucked. Through the dusk he had caught a glimpse of a recent rock slide down the side of a hill beside the stream. "This looks like where I fell!"
They were already past the point but Zinga circled back, as Kartr squinted through the storm dusk and tried to imagine how that same section would look to a man lying flat on the ledge near the top of the rise.
The aircraft snapped out of the circle and veered suddenly to the right, across the crest of the hill. Kartr's protest was forgotten as he sighted what had drawn Zinga's attention. The top of a tree had been shorn off, the newly splintered wood of the trunk gleaming whitely. With the pressure of expert fingers on the controls the Zacathan set the lifeboat down on the slope of the rise, a piece of maneuvering which might have at another time brought honest praise from the sergeant. But now Kartr was too intent upon what might lie just beyond the broken tree.
He found a mass of crushed branches and the remains of the sled. No one, not even a master mech-techneer, could ever reassemble what lay there now. The wreckage was jammed almost bow down in tight wrappings of withered leaves and broken wood and it was empty.
Zinga sniffed deeply as his torch revealed the bareness of that crumpled seat.
"No blood even. The question is — were either or both of you aboard when she hit?"
Kartr shook his head, a little awed by the completeness of the crack-up.
"I don't think either of us could have been. Maybe he threw me out and — "
"Yes — and if you fought back that could have made him lose control so this would happen. But then where is Cummi — or his remains. No mess at all — something would remain if he had been collected by a wandering meat eater — "
"He could have jumped just before she hit," suggested the sergeant. "If he had an anti-grav on his belt he could have made it on such a short fall without smashing himself."
"So we look for a few tracks now?" Zinga's long jaw jutted out as he glanced up at the sky. "Rain is going to spoil that — "
For the clouds were emptying their weight of water at last. Together the rangers stumbled through a beating downpour to the lee of a rock outcrop which gave a faint hint of shelter. The trees might have kept off more of that smothering blast but, Kartr decided as he saw branches whiplash under the wind, that might be more dangerous an asylum than the corner where they huddled gasping, the rain stinging their skin and finding its way through every crevice of their tunics and breeches.
"It can't keep on like this forever — there isn't that much water," Kartr said and then realized that the drum of rain drowned out any but a parade ground pitch of voice.
He sneezed and shivered and thought bitterly that Zinga was going to be proved right. This deluge would mask any trail Cummi might have left hereabouts.
Then, in an instant, he snapped erect and felt Zinga's answering jerk. The Zacathan was as startled as he had been.
They had caught a faint, very faint plea for help. From Cummi? Somehow he believed not. But it had come from a human — or rather from an intelligent mind. Someone or something which was alive, and reasoning, was in trouble. The sergeant turned slowly, trying to center the source. The pain and terror in that plea must be answered!
13. Cummi'S Kingdom
"Due north — " Zinga's gutturals reached him, and the Zacathan's keener perception was right.
"Can the lifeboat ride this?" Kartr's own experience with small air craft had been limited to those of the Patrol and the stability of their exploring sleds was proved — they had been designed for rough going under strange weather conditions. But the machine they had to use now did not arouse any confidence in him.
Zinga shrugged. "Well, it isn't the sled. But the force of the wind is lessening and we certainly can't start out on foot — "
They sprinted through the wall of falling water. And a moment later gained the cramped cabin of the lifeboat. It was a relief to be out of the pounding rain. But, even as they settled into their seats, the light craft rocked under them. Get this up into the full force of the wind — they would be riding a leaf whirled around in a vortex — !
But, with that thought in both their minds, neither hesitated. Zinga started the propeller beams and Kartr sent out a mind probe, trying to touch the one who had asked for their help.
They were lucky in some things, the dusk of the storm clouds was clearing. And Zinga had been correct, the wind was dying. The light craft bucked, swerved, dipped and soared as the Zacathan fought at the controls to hold her on course. But they were airborne and high enough above the tree tops to escape the fate of the wrecked sled.
"Should we circle — ?" Zinga thought instead of spoke.
"Enough fuel?" Kartr asked in answer to that as he leaned forward to read the gage on the instrument board.
"You're right — can't afford that," Zinga agreed. "A quarter of a tal of bucking these winds and we'll be walking anyway — "
Kartr did not try to translate "tal" into his own terms of measurement. He had a suggestion to make.
"Pick out some good landmarks ahead and set us down — "
"Then we take to our feet? It might work. It will — if this deluge slackens. And there is your landmark — agreed? Put us in the middle of that — "
"That" lay about a mile before them, a wide circle of bare and blackened ground covered with the charred stumps of trees among which the thin green heads of saplings were beginning to show. Sometime not too far in the past this section had been burnt over. Zinga brought them down where the stumps were fewer.
And just as they left the lifeboat that plea for help reached them again, the terror in it plainer. Kartr caught something else. They were not the only living things to answer that call. There was a hunter on the trail ahead, a four-footed hunter, hungry — one who had not fed that day or the night before.
The slot of an old game trail led across the burnt land. Years of pressing hooves and pads had worn it so deep that it could be followed by touch as well as by sight. Kartr's boots slipped into it easily and he trotted on through the slackening rain toward a sharp rise of bare rock. The rock wall which had once kept the fire from advancing was broken in one place by a narrow gap through which the game trail led. And then it went down slope into the heart of a real forest.
Not too far ahead was the hunter, very close to its prey. Kartr caught the mind of the one who was trapped. It was human — but not Cummi. A stranger, hurt, alone, and very much afraid. A different mind —
Now the hunter knew it was being followed. It hesitated — and Kartr heard a cry which was hardly more than a moan. There was a screen of bushes through which he beat his way and then he stood looking down at broken tree limbs and at a small, pitifully thin body pinned to the ground by one shattered branch. A distorted face was turned up to him — and he saw that the captive was no straggler from the city.
Kartr threw himself down in the soft muck and tried to lift the weight of the limb. But he could not shift it far enough for the other to escape. And now the hunter waited — just beyond a neighboring clump of bushes.
"Yahhhhh — " That rising, horrible bellow was the battle cry of a Zacathan warrior. A blaster cracked above Kartr's head.
The tawny-furred body had been met in mid-spring by a searing shaft of flame. And the power of the beam bore it back, already terribly dead, into the very nest of leaves from which it had just sprung. A thick stench of singed hair and flesh curled about them.