The Hunter Victorious (28 page)

Barat Krol continued the charade with a straight face. “Much has been destroyed and the passages are filled with broken rock
and debris, but I believe that a way could be cleared.”

“Would you be willing to lead a party of volunteers to clear the way so that the wounded may receive proper treatment?”

Barat Krol had been tortured by the thought of what was happening to his own people throughout the long hours it took him
to clear an escape route large enough to safely remove the dwarf. Many times he had been on the verge of leaving the unconscious
dwarf and investigating the fate of his own kind, but always something held him back, prevented him from leaving Septua’s
side. He had cursed himself for a fool,
but now he thought he saw a way to turn the situation to his advantage.

“I will do as you ask,” he agreed, and was immediately cheered by the crowd who surrounded him. “But only,” he continued,
“if your healers will extend their services to those of my people who might also have suffered injuries.”

A pall of quiet fell across the crowd as they pondered the outrage of his words. Excited voices battered him with cries of
indignation and shock, instantly infuriated at the suggestion that a Madrelli’s life might be regarded on the same level of
importance as their own. They advanced toward Barat Krol with angry gestures.

“Stop!” cried Braldt, placing himself between the Madrelli and the angry crowd. “We need them. What harm can come of treating
their injuries as well as our own? Is a life not a life, no matter to whom it belongs?”

It was obvious that this was not a popular thought and Braldt received many strange glances, but in the end they were forced
to agree to Barat Krol’s proposal. Unless they were able to traverse the dangerous stretch of ground and excavate the hospital,
many who lay injured would join the list of fatalities before the night was out.

Barat Krol lost no time in making his way to the Madrelli compound, where he spoke at length to his kinfolk. At first the
Madrelli were as difficult as the Scandis. They too had suffered numerous deaths and injuries, and could see no reason to
further risk themselves in order to aid their masters.

It was only with great difficulty that Barat Krol was able to convince them that such an effort would work in their own best
interests. Only by appealing to several females whose children had been gravely injured was he able to persuade them at last.
The children were to be among the first who were healed.

* * *

The effort was launched and after the Madrelli had scaled the face of the fall and hammered home a sturdy ladder and catwalk,
they were joined by teams of Scandis. It was, quite possibly, the first time such a joint effort had ever taken place, Madrelli
and Scandis working shoulder to shoulder voluntarily to achieve a common goal.

Throughout the remainder of the day and into the night they worked, erecting a more permanent walkway and then clearing the
clogged passageways and the operating theaters beyond. And when it was finally possible to move the first of the wounded,
not one voice was raised in protest when the Madrelli young and Septua were placed at the head of the column.

Slipping away from her duties, Mirna stood beside the sedated dwarf, his leg and foot encased in a lightweight polymer cast
with numerous bone filament rods extending from one side to the other. It would be a long time, if ever, before the thief
did any sneaking, Mirna thought with a grin which quickly twisted into a tearful grimace. It was hard seeing the cheery, independent
thief lying so still and helpless.

“Wot are you doin’ ’ere? Never mind, wipe them tears off yer face or I’ll smack ya.”

Mirna looked up at the rusty croak of words and saw Septua regarding her through puffy, slitted lids, his homely face further
distorted by numerous bruises and scrapes. Mirna’s face was wreathed in a joyous smile that none of the dwarf’s growls or
threats were able to remove.

Exhausted but satisfied by his long day’s work, Braldt wrapped himself in his cloak and settled down on one of the pallets
that had been laid out for the vast horde of survivors who preferred to sleep in the open.

He had positioned himself so that he could watch the door
way to Keri’s chambers. Her rooms being in such close proximity to those of the king, there was no way that he could think
of to reach her. But somehow just seeing the doorway, imagining her and what she might be doing, thinking, was almost enough.
Braldt closed his eyes and slept.

The blue alien known as Fortran was truly astonished—speechless, in fact, in a manner of speaking, since Fortran and the others
of his kind had long ago done away with the need for spoken speech. Anything that needed to be conveyed—words, nuances, emotions—was
accomplished by thought transference, which took the entire range of meaning and emotion and placed it within the being one
was communicating with. It did away with such tiresome problems as language and species differences and left little room for
misunderstandings. On the whole, it was a much better system than anything that had gone before.

What had astonished Fortran so completely was the second to final step in his progression, or, to use an archaic phrase, his
rite of manhood. By daring to think, to question, to defy the authority which he had grown up with, he had exhibited the first
necessary quality of a sentient adult, the ability to think and act on his own even when such actions were both difficult
and unpopular.

This he had done, the first but thankfully not the last of his class to do so. It had all been a test, he was able to see
that now, and being a natural-born troublemaker (as his mother pointed out proudly), it should have come as no surprise that
he had been the first to rebel against the rigid order that had been imposed upon him and his fellow classmates.

After Fortran’s emergence, others began to appear at a slow but steady rate; there were nearly a thousand of them now. More
than two-thirds of their original numbers had still not emerged, however, and still remained locked in blind
obedience and, it was assumed, the lowermost Rototaran dungeons.

It was to be hoped that some of them would still find their way to enlightenment, but sadly, it was not likely. The blue aliens
had long ago discovered a disappointing fact: that given the choice, most would choose the safety and anonymity of blind obedience
rather than the breadth and freedom of new and uncharted pathways.

While it was always grievous to lose so many, such a large percentage of their young, it was necessary. In an interesting
correlation, if one was given to that sort of thing, it bore out the hypothesis of that ancient thinker, Charles Darwin. In
their own way, it was the aliens’ method of the advancement of their species: Only the smart survive.

The blue aliens had spent—wasted—many thousands of years attempting to pass on the lessons they had learned to their young,
and found, just as countless civilizations had found before them, that the young were not interested in absorbing or embracing
their parents’ dictums and knowledge. The young seemed singularly disinterested in anything save their own hungers.

The odd exception to this unhappy fact came from a most unexpected quarter. It seemed that while the young rejected their
parents’ teachings, they would search diligently through the archives of history to involve themselves with the most esoteric
and bizarre of the galaxy’s theologies and philosophies.

This presented a problem, for the aliens had long known that there were no true gods other than intelligence and conscience.
This, then, was the quandary: how to present and teach the important messages of life to their young without seeming to do
so.

The elders conferred and decided, if their young were determined to become involved in the tangles of religion, it would
be one of their own choosing. Therefore, they set themselves to the task of inventing a new religion, an interesting amalgam
of all the galaxy’s religions, taking this ritual from one religion, this ceremony from another, and so on until they had
a fine admixture of hocus-pocus, mysticism, and romance.

The young were enlisted in a religious order rife with ritual and mystic messages. Concealed within the hokum, buried deeply,
cloaked with convoluted verbiage, were the all-important words their elders wished them to absorb: Be intelligent, think for
yourself, act with honor, speak with truth, be kind to others, yes, and even treat others as you would have them treat you.
These and other equally simple but universal truths were planted in the young, unformed minds. Then all the parents and teachers
could do was sit back and wait and hope that in time a true revelation would occur.

Now that Fortran and his comrades had taken the Great Step, there was but one final step to complete before they were permitted
to take their place among the respected elders of their kind: They were to perform some act, of their own choosing, which
would exemplify all that they had learned, to prove that they were indeed capable of independent, intelligent, caring thought.

This action, whatever it might be, was left to their own discretion. It could take place anywhere in the universe, as long
as it did not cause damage or death to another life-form. Many of Fortran’s comrades had trouble deciding upon a direction,
but Fortran had no trouble at all.

The morning dawned clear and cold and, though there appeared to be numerous foggy coronas surrounding the sun, which some
of the older women predicted meant disaster and death, Skirnir was determined to carry out the burials of the disaster’s victims.

Everyone who was physically able accompanied the procession.
The population was now so small—no more than fifteen hundred Scandis and Madrelli combined—that it was the rare individual
who had not lost a family member or a friend in the disaster.

Skirnir, Carn, and the volva led the way, followed in turn by the ranks of priests, clad in ermine and sables and embroidered
robes and weighted down with gold. The king was carried on a cushioned litter, his feverish eyes lifted to the surrounding
peaks rather than the proceedings. With every passing moment, Skirnir felt that the king was slipping away, his body still
present but his mind and heart elsewhere. He had been heavily sedated against the pain and Skirnir could only hope that it
would last until he was safely returned to his chambers.

The king was followed by his two remaining shape-changers and then a phalanx of the royal guard. Next came the wailing, keening
line of mourners, who trudged beside the sledges which bore the dead in their large red earthen jars.

Skirnir could not have put a name to it, but he was filled with dread, with the terrible certainty that something would go
wrong and upset his carefully laid plans. For all his fears, he could do nothing more than watch and wait.

The day was bitter cold; the sun did little more than shed a thin, pale light. The odd coronas were more clearly visible and
it was seen that there were four of them, each slightly larger than the last, glistening rainbows circling the sun. The sky
itself was a dark, deep, ominous shade of blue that seemed to squeeze in around the sun as though it were a hungry beast nibbling
at the edges before devouring it whole.

Braldt felt a deep uneasiness that had nothing to do with the cold or the color of the sky. He was fearful of what they would
find when they arrived at the burial mound. All around them were signs of the devastation that had shaken their world; the
mountain known as Aasgard had certainly not
been singled out for destruction. Whole mountainsides were stripped of snow, naked down to the bare rock. Entire sections
of mountains had broken away and fallen into the valleys below, exposing their scarred flanks to the biting wind.

The procession’s path was strewn with evidence of the violence of the quake and it became more and more difficult to proceed.
At length it was necessary for the guards to go ahead to break a trail through the mounds of icy snow and rock. At one point
they found their way blocked by a vast sheet of ice and it was thought that they would have to turn back until one guard,
braver and more daring than the rest, picked a way across the ice and chopped out a path that others might follow.

The wailing and crying ceased long before they reached their goal; each breath came harsh and painful, the icy particles in
the air frosting their throats and chilling their lungs. Scarves and cloaks offered little protection against the frigid temperatures.
Hands and feet and exposed skin were numb and unfeeling. Faces were mottled with frostbite despite the protective measures
which had been taken. Each step was a descent into hell, without the warmth, yet they continued on.

When at last they reached the narrow defile that led to the burial ground, they were almost too exhausted and too cold to
care. Only Skirnir’s imprecations, like barbed goads, kept them on the path. The king had long since retreated into a mound
of down-filled polyskins and was not to be seen.

The high walls of the gorge broke the vicious cut of the wind which had hounded them from the start. The silence, the absence
of sound, was strange and almost eerie after the howling that had filled their ears for so long. Now they could hear the crunch
of each footfall, the rasp of each painful breath as they approached the dark upright plinths that marked the gateway to the
halls of the dead.

Now it was the volva’s moment. She stepped forward, her hood fallen back from her face. Her cheeks were pale, devoid of color,
in contrast to the bright red, wind-whipped cheeks that marked everyone else. Her eyes were bright and glistening as though
fevered. Her dark hair fell in smooth waves, seemingly untouched by wind or the weight of the heavy hood. It was as though
she had just stepped out of her own chambers, so little was she affected by their cruel surroundings.

A murmur of unease swept through the crowd. The seeress struck fear into their hearts, and despite her lineage—a pure, unbroken
line that could be traced back into the earliest recorded Scandi history—they had never felt that she was one of them.