How in the name of the rain gods was he going to free them? Tooqui wondered. First he would have to slip into their camp. Then he would somehow have to deal with guards. Qulun guards, bigger and stronger than himself. He had nothing to use for a weapon except rocks. Assuming he could manage to reach their transport undetected and take care of any sentinels, he would still need enough time to free all four of his friends, and maybe maybe the two Alwari as well. Afterward, they would have to recover their special personal things, take back their suuba-tars, and ride off intact and unharmed into the grasslands. Ten Tooquis would not be enough to do such a thing, and there was only one of him.
Wishing for more would gain him nothing, he knew. The Gwurran were a tough tribe. They had not survived inhospitable country and forbidding fauna through dint of heavy wishing. Where resources were lacking, they found acceptable substitutes, or devised their own.
That was it, he knew. He had some hasty devising to do. Rea son and logic might all seem to lead toward inevitable failure, but Tooqui was able to compensate for his small self with an outsized ego. If nothing else, his own boastfulness would not let him fail.
Now, if only he could find a way to make the Qulun under stand that.
Every step, every forward lurch of the plodding sadains he was following took him farther from home, from the safety of familiar hills and the warmth of the Gwurran tribe. He tried not to think about how far he was from everything he knew. Water was not a problem, rain having collected in small pools and depressions in the hard-packed prairie dirt. But he had to spend time searching for food, and then would have to hurry to catch back up to the steadily advancing caravan. Days passed in this fashion, then another, and another. Tired and filthy and homesick, he nevertheless somehow managed to keep up with the procession.
Yet another evening saw him no closer to a possible way of rescuing his friends than when he had hidden in the kholot burrow. As night fell, tired and hungry he once again sought shelter from marauding predators, and found himself having to move farther and farther away from the encampment. He regretted the loss of light from the camp's glowpoles, even if they could only be safely viewed from a distance. But safety was more important than a cheery glow in the night. If not a burrow, or a high tree, he would have to find some big rocks he could squeeze between before he allowed himself to rest.
What he encountered instead was a distant rumbling and booming. "Ou, pifyotl" he mumbled. As if his present situation wasn't bad enough, now it was going to rain. Pretty hard, too, judging by the smell of it. Wind swirled around him as if suddenly unsure of what direction to take, and the taste of impending moisture was heavy on the night air. Kapchenaga boomed off to the north, announcing his advance with steady earthward thrusts of the Light-That- Burned.
Behind him, the camp would be bracing itself for the arrival of the approaching storm: sealing house joints, fastening windows, securing livestock, and rolling up pennants and advertisements. The Qulun and their prisoners would wait out the storm safe and snug within sturdy shelters, warmed by hot food and imported offworld heaters. Meanwhile he, Tooqui, would be lucky to find a dry burrow not already occupied by some inhospitable creature.
An overhang beneath a rock would be better, he knew as he continued searching. Not as warm as a burrow, but far less likely to already be claimed for the night. Unlike an Alwari or a human, he had his coat of fur to keep him warm. At least the rain that was coming would mask his scent from roving meat eaters.
There, in front of him in the darkness-an unexpected ridge of hills. Just in time, too, judging from the rising wind. Already, fast-moving clouds were beginning to block out the stars and the light of Ansion's first ascending moon. Thunder was sounding more frequently now, and the first fat raindrops began to slap at the grass. Blinking away drip- drops, he headed for a gap between the nearest hills. A flash of Kapchenaga's breath briefly lit up the sky. Tooqui froze. These were not hills he was silently approaching. He knew that was the case not only because of what he had seen in that split second of illumination, but because the hill he was nearest to had turned a baleful eye in his direction.
Lorqual.
So startled was he that he couldn't decide whether to curl up on the ground, turn and run, or simply topple over unconscious. As a consequence, he did none of these. Instead, he just stood where he was, staring, as the rain began to fall in earnest. The sound of it pattering against the grass was familiar and soothing, but did nothing to remove the threat of the moaning mountains that loomed massively before him.
And he had almost gone strolling blithely in among them, he realized in shock.
The lorqual were, at least insofar as the Gwurran knew, the biggest inhabitants of the plains. Though they stood only slightly taller at their two sets of shoulders than did the suubatar, the lorqual were far more massive. A single mature adult would weigh as much as four suubatars. Their strange, stiff, brown and beige fur stuck straight out from their sides, giving them a bristly appearance. Haifa dozen solid, bony knobs protruded from each massive skull. In rutting season, the sound of adult bull lorqual smashing into each other head to head could be heard across vast sweeps of prairie. Each of six feet terminated in an equal number of powerful horn-shielded toes: three facing forward and three back, a design perfectly suited to supporting the creature's great weight.
In contrast to their immense size, they had only two com paratively small eyes, one on either side of the blocky skull. But the single nostril opening was large enough for a Gwurran to hide within. Mounted on the end of a short, flexible snout that was constantly testing the air, it provided all necessary warning of possible danger.
Not that anything could really threaten a herd of lorqual, Tooqui knew. Even the young, once they were a couple of weeks old, were too big and powerful for anything less than a full pack of prowling shanhs to attack. Usually they were intolerant of intruders in their midst. But they ignored him. Huddled together as they were, he realized, they must be preoccupied with the impending squall. The rain that was falling would also serve to conceal his presence from them, masking his smell.
Lightning was flashing more frequently now, allowing him a better view of the herd. He judged it to be sizable, though it was impossible to gauge its full extent. He could not see over or around a single lorqual, much less the dozen or so immediately in front of him. These might constitute the entire herd, or there might be a dozen more animals lined up behind them, bony heads pressed against bristling flanks and hindmosts.
That was when he had the idea. It could as easily kill him as make him a hero. But after three days of hard scrambling through high grass, over rocky places, and down clammy mud holes, it was the first idea he'd had. That it might also be his last weighed heavily on him. It very likely might not even work.