There had been only six. They had given me more trouble than twice their number of armed men. One of the reasons lay in those coat-hanger shoulders, each with five whipping tendrils. Even allowing a man two arms, which on Kregen is usual although by no means universal, the count was as though I had fought thirty men. I touched the hilt of the sword. I had lived then, by the sword. The balance of the thought lay leaden and ugly in my mind, and I did not speak as we marched through the pink-shot moonlight of the Kregen night.
After that we redoubled our vigilance and only through extraordinary good fortune were we able to avoid similar encounters. The tendril monsters roamed over a goodly-sized portion of the land here and we found ourselves traveling in constant apprehension. A considerable extent of badlands worked its way in from the south as we trended east, forcing us to carry on in a slanting angle to the east-northeast. Delia shook her head and remarked that she did not recall flying over this kind of country at all when she’d come in from Port Tavetus. Although the feeling was marginal, I had, with that sea officer’s sense of navigational direction, felt we had veered to the north during our passage through The Stratemsk and the attack by the impiters had further driven us off course.
But I did not express my concern, thankful that we were still alive and still fit to travel. Thelda was hardening, and Delia positively glowed with the fresh air and exercise. The climactic shadow of The Stratemsk lay to our rear now, the forests indicated that, and the badlands must be an effect of absence of soil or presence of minerals and poor soil and the millennia-long erosion. The mountains had been traversed and although we did not know their names we were conscious of their puniness in contrast to The Stratemsk; all the same, they were arduous on foot, and we near froze a couple of times. On the eastern side the whole country changed in character. Now we were hard-pressed to avoid cultivated areas, to bypass towns and villages, to keep off the highroads that intersected at towns and posting stations and gave us clear indication that this land was populated.
We would scout with the minutest attention to every detail of the land that lay ahead. From whatever eminence we could climb we would plot our passage. Some of the towns we saw and avoided were nearer cities than towns. Many times we lay in hedgerows while cavalcades of armed men and trundling wagons rolled along paved roads. The roads were, indeed, objects of wonder. I was reminded of the old Inca or Roman roads, and I suspected that they were still in such good condition only through the skill of their builders, for the present inhabitants of this land looked hard and brutal and contemptuous of labor, lusting after silver and gold and the good things of life.
“They remind me of my own people in their hardness,” said Seg. “These cities and towns must be constantly warring one with another.”
“I agree,” said Delia. “The roads link them, but between each city and its surrounding cultivation lies barrenness.”
More than once we saw high-flying birds or winged beasts, and concealed ourselves, for we knew what to expect.
Now we began more fully to understand why all the continent lying between The Stratemsk and the eastern coast of Turismond had been dubbed the Hostile Territories. The true hostility came from men and not from nature or the animals of the wild.
I continued to feel concern over the northerly drift of our course; but in the nature of things with an infuriating obstinacy events conspired to force us more northerly still. I knew that Turismond extended in a bold out-thrust promontory into the Cyphren Sea and if we were traveling eastward we could march as much as five hundred unnecessary miles to the east with the sea away down to our south. But I was not prepared to risk an encounter with the inhabitants of these pinnacled cities, these battlemented fortresses, for I sensed from what we saw of them that they differed in kind from those peoples I had already met on Kregen.
More than once we bypassed cities inhabited by beast-men, half-men of races with which none of us was familiar, although given the strangeness of human nature I felt a comical sense of relief when the semi-humans of these cities turned out to be Ochs or Rapas, much though I distrusted the former and detested the latter — emotions which, I hasten to add, were germane to my continued existence at the time, whatever subsequent changes a long life and a great experience have brought. None of us had the slightest hesitation in giving the widest of wide berths to the sprawling city filled with Chuliks upon which we almost stumbled as we came down out of a hill-cleft into a wide valley. We crawled back up into the hills again and when I tried to lay off a course southerly we were halted by a river on the banks of which a string of guard-towers had been built. Perforce we struck northward once more.
The whole land was cut up into city-states. Antiquaries say there were ninety city-states of the ancient Minoan civilization in Crete. They must have been very small. Here the city-states sprawled over vast areas of land, or huddled around a natural fortress-holding on a hill within a valley. The state of savagery of the intervening areas can best be judged if I tell you that Seg and I had often to cope with sudden attacks from leem, those eight-legged demons, furred, feline, and vicious, whose fangs in their wedge-shaped heads can strike through lenk. And, too, we met graints, those wonderfully vital and obstinate animals I had met and battled outside Aphrasoe with the magical swords of the Savanti that did not kill but merely stunned. These, and other wild animals, were not in the usual way to be found anywhere close to settled human or half-human habitations.
‘According to my calculations,” Delia said to me as we rested in a fold of gentle, grass-clad hills, eating the rich flesh of a deer-like animal Seg had brought down and the girls had cooked, “I figure we have something like two hundred dwaburs between The Stratemsk and Port Tavetus.”
“Yes.”
“We must have covered that by now — we’ve been walking for ages-”
“Yes, Delia. But we are north of our course-”
“Oh, yes, I know you have been concerned. .” She pondered. Then, briskly, she said, with that defiant tilt to her chin: “All right, then. The airboat carried us a good way, and we have marched a long way. We do not seem to be able to head south — so we must go on. I think we will find the next Vallian port city up the coast will be Ventrusa Thole. There are port cities of Pandahem, but I think we would be wise to avoid them.”
Pandahem, I knew, was a great rival of Vallia’s in the carrying trade and in business of the outer oceans. But there was a quiet animosity in Delia’s tones that startled me.
“Do you hate them so much, then, my Delia?”
“Hate? No, not really. We both seek to enrich ourselves on the leavings of the empire of Loh. We both maintain settlements on the eastern coast of Turismond. We both try to extend our business contacts to the west-”
“And a fat lot of good that does!” broke in Thelda. She pushed up on an elbow. Thelda had lost weight on our journey and her figure had trimmed off into statuesque beauty that poor Seg found mightily disturbing. “By Vox!” she said, with some force. “I heartily wish all the devils from Pandahem a watery grave!”
“Quite still!” said Seg. His voice cracked. The green radiance of Genodras lay on his face and turned that lean tanned visage into a ghoul-skull newly-risen from the grave with the grave-mold crumbling upon it.
We all remained absolutely still.
Now I could hear the beat of many wings. From the sky that susurration floated down, ominous, breath-catching.